Collin Atherton with his "graveyard" of early attempts to make magnetic coils.

As Engels’s story shows, experimental physics requires clever hands as well as a sharp mind. To help students gain manual skills, George Henry and his staff teach a course in machining, and there’s a student shop just off the main shop for their use.

They developed the class a few years ago, when the small shop started having problems with students breaking equipment and leaving work areas messy.

“Now, before you can go in there, you have to take this course and certify,” says physics chairman Tomsovic. “There’s a punch code on the door, and they can tell who went in there. If somebody doesn’t clean up after themselves, or does something unsafe, George can say, ‘I’m taking your privileges away.’

Now, he says, “students get important training in a safe environment, and the opportunity to make sophisticated equipment.”

Junior Collin Atherton took the course, and has developed other skills while working in Engels’s lab. One of his jobs there was to wind copper wire on a cylindrical core to create a magnet for the BEC machine.

“When he first gave me the task to make these coils, I was, ‘Yeah, OK,’” recalls Atherton. It turned out to be a lot harder than he expected. He slides open a drawer crowded with failed attempts. “You can see our drawer, our ‘graveyard.’ I finally got a few, and then we realized they were too big. It’s such a small part of the machine, but it took a while to do.”

Being good with their hands is so important to budding physicists, that professor Tom Dickinson rates it on par with brains and enthusiasm. Each year, 20 to 30 undergraduates apply to work in his lab. He has space for just eight. To decide who makes the cut, he looks beyond their grades in physics and math.

“I ask them what they’ve built,” he says.

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