I discovered my affinity for attractive instruments while working a job before coming to NIST. My boss at the time had a love affair with the common hose clamp—the one with the worm gear.

Whenever we had to fasten a component to an apparatus he said, “Why don’t you use a hose clamp?” With every hose clamp that we added to the experiment, my hatred for them grew larger, and I started to develop the philosophy of the “beautiful instrument.” Back then, any hose clamp-free instrument qualified as one, but I have refined my threshold since. The biggest kudos I could give students working for my boss and me was, “This is what I call a beautiful instrument.” In my ideal world, all researchers would aim to build an instrument (or experiment or apparatus) with aesthetic appeal.

All other things being equal, if you had the choice between working with a good-looking instrument or an ugly one, which would you choose? Of course you would choose the beautiful instrument because it is a joy to be surrounded by lovely things. Following this logic, no ugly experiment should exist in the world, and we can close the case.

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