[Scythels]

It's really quite a shame, but understandable.  I just question why go through acquiring some optical lab equipment (namely the HeNe laser, beam expander, staging stuff, beam splitters, etc) the beam for which would be $35,000+ and set it up on plywood.  The Air-ride tables we use to isolate experiments from vibrations are more expensive than that in and of themselves, but 1/4"-20 4" breadboards large enough to set this experiment up are under $1,000 and would improve the accuracy (and legitimacy) of things tremendously.  The air conditioning and filtering necessary to clean up thermal interference would be far outside their budget, but many of the things they have require contact/ going through a supply chain instead of anonymous ordering - I question why not ask for some counsel before spending so much only to get 25% of the way there.

 

It's still interesting, but it would have been useful to do a better test.

 

I mean, renting lab time and having access to an 'actual' interferometer like this puppy: http://www.zygo.com/?/met/interferometers/verifire/mst/ would have been so much more useful.  They could have measured the surface roughness to the nearest 1~5nm depending on the lab/interferometer, quantified the aberrations from the mirror, and even tested mirror+lens vs a reference flat and then computed out the spherical aberration induced by testing non-flat systems on a flat.

 

But, I guess they have begun stocking some lab equipment now... there are still hundreds of thousands of $ left to go before they can produce a legitimate setup, however.