Science Quote by Simon van der Meer

The sentence moves with the quiet swagger of someone who can afford understatement. Van der Meer is talking about rings - not jewelry, but the accelerator rings at CERN that take messy, reluctant beams of particles and force them into disciplined circulation. Yet he phrases a world-changing technical story as administrative continuity: “worked with the group,” “commissioned and improved,” “now preparing.” It’s a deliberately collective grammar that downplays lone-genius mythology while still placing him at the center of a long arc of engineering triumph.

The tell is the final clause: “increase the p stacking rate by an order of magnitude.” In accelerator physics, that’s not a nice-to-have. It’s a bet that the machine’s limiting bottleneck can be cracked, and that once it is, an entire research program suddenly becomes possible. “p” is almost certainly protons, and “stacking” points to the unglamorous, crucial art of accumulating enough particles with the right properties to make high-energy collisions productive. The subtext is that discovery isn’t just theory; it’s logistics at relativistic speeds.

The intent is partly documentary - a scientist marking phases of work - but it also signals a particular CERN ethos: progress as iteration, commissioning followed by improvement followed by scaling. There’s restrained pride here, the kind that treats “an order of magnitude” as both a technical metric and a moral one: evidence that patience, precision, and teamwork can move the frontier faster than rhetoric ever will.