Time & Perspective Quote by Simon van der Meer

The drama here is deliberately underplayed. Van der Meer reports a career pivot the way most people note a change in train platforms: one technical chapter closes, another begins, no victory lap required. That flatness is the point. In high-energy physics, prestige often accretes around big machines and big announcements, yet the field runs on people who can move from power supplies to proton-antiproton ambitions and then, without complaint, to the unglamorous physics of keeping hardware cold. The tone is the subtext: seriousness without self-mythology.

Context sharpens it. The SPS at CERN was not a side project; it was a foundational accelerator, and power supplies are the quiet arterial system that keeps beams stable. Saying that work “had just come to an end” signals a moment when infrastructure matured enough to hand off, freeing talent for the next escalation: the pp (proton-antiproton) project, the road that would lead to collider breakthroughs and, ultimately, the kind of results that win Nobel Prizes. Yet he immediately pairs that headline trajectory with “cooling in a small ring (ICE),” a reminder that epochal science depends on experimental housekeeping: thermal control, stability, tolerances, the stubborn material world.

The intent reads like a lab notebook entry, but it functions as an ethos statement. Van der Meer frames progress as collective, iterative, and technical rather than charismatic. He joins groups; he studies; he tests. In an era that likes genius narratives, he offers a procedural one: history made by the person willing to take the next necessary problem, even if it sounds boring.