Automating a double-slit setup for data gathering - DONE! And it's so COOL!

Have you ever had a job that only an engineer could do and the only engineer you know is way over-qualified for the job? And yet -- you ask that engineer to help out and the engineer agrees, even though the work is well beneath his paygrade?

That's the situation I found myself in when I asked Loren Carpenter to be on my team for the Future Photon experiment ( http://www.tinyurl.com/FuturePhotons ). In case you're unaware, Loren is a Pixar co-founder and an Oscar-winning computer scientist. And he has built some of the most innovative machines for gathering data related to subtle and not-well-understood influences. Nonetheless, thanks to his interest in quantum mechanics, he was willing to build this relatively simple and totally workable automated system for gathering data from an optical double-slit setup (by TeachSpin).

I'm ever grateful! This enables me to run many experiments, even as I sleep. YES!! Excited to start making sleeping double-slit discoveries, as well as waking ones!