What excites and inspires David Wineland in science today?

“The stuff we’re working on I still find really interesting—quantum information, quantum computing, quantum limits to measurements—the path we’ve been on for a long time. There’s still interesting things to do there.

“To go a little broader, one thing that I think is really cool—and we debated about 10 years ago whether we might jump in this direction—has to do with micromechanical devices and nanomechanical resonators,” which are devices that vibrate at specific frequencies such as atoms but lie in the “mesoscopic” size range between atoms and larger macroscopic objects.

“There are many features that are similar to what we do with atoms, but these are much more macroscopic devices … To me that’s a field that’s certainly opened up over the last 10 or more years, and it’ll continue to grow. It’s certainly one of the more open subjects people are working on. That’s just one example that particularly intrigued me. Where the field is going, I think it will be really interesting.”