Elena Voss had not slept in forty-three hours. The coffee in her hand was cold, but she drank it anyway, watching the digital micrometer on her workstation fluctuate between 0.9997 mm and 1.0001 mm. Her target was 1.0000 mm. For anyone else, that was a success. For CYPrE 2016, it was failure.
“At CYPrE, insane is the entry fee.” cype 2016
Elena, a twenty-seven-year-old PhD candidate from ETH Zurich, had submitted a last-minute prototype: a self-calibrating ceramic gauge block that could compensate for thermal expansion at the atomic lattice level. Her theoretical paper was solid. Her physical prototype, however, had a ghost. Elena Voss had not slept in forty-three hours