When you can’t grab more real estate, you make more room in the lab. Four physicists move two optical tables, and nobody gets injured. Who’d have thunk it?

Officially, not really. This is all a gag, a spoof, a put-upon, since somebody, somewhere might frown upon the kind of do-it-yourself attitude of four unsupervised physicists playing with heavy equipment. So here’s what did not happen:

Our bundles of joy need to be placed where there is sufficient overhead space for assembly, and that meant some reshuffling of the lab, and that meant moving optics tables. Big, heavy brutes. Fortunately we discovered that the heavier one had casters built in to the legs, and were able to move it quite easily. Only a few hours of bundling up cables to make sure we didn’t overtension anything, and that table only had to be moved a few feet, so many of the cables stayed in place.

Moving the second table was a lot more involved. Continue reading →