13,000 Spins Entangled. I Still Felt Alone

Lab notebook, unsent: Today, we entangled 13,000 nuclear spins. The data looked clean. The paper will say we unlocked a new dark state, that we stored quantum information longer than anyone expected. But the paper won’t mention the nights I stared at the scope, waiting for a signal that never came. Or the hours lost to tuning feedback loops, chasing coherence through noise that never really left. Everyone will talk about the breakthrough. No one will ask how many times I almost quit. How many times I wondered if I was just background noise, too. I kept going because I didn’t know how to stop. Maybe that’s the real experiment—seeing how much you can lose before you call it enough. #LabBurnout #QuantumFatigue #ScienceAlone #Science