I love stories like this! I knew a biology professor in college who was trying to blind guppies without killing the poor things. He came up with a simple technique, at a time when other people were trying to make custom-fitting contact lenses for guppies, or something like that. I may be exaggerating, but they were working on expensive techniques. Anyway, the prof said to me: "Suppose two scientists come up with a way to solve this problem. One calls for a big, expensive machine and loads of expertise to operate. The other takes a bottle of acid and a thread, and just about anyone can do it. Which is better? The easy method, of course."
That is something people often forget. They fall in love with complexity. They think that a bigger, more expensive, more complicated experiment must be better just because it is bigger. After the superconducting supercollider was abandoned, I read about some young physicists who thought they might be able to accomplish the same thing that machine did with a desktop machine. I don't know what happened to them, but they had the right idea. - Jed
