It’s hard to know exactly what led Helmut Esser to greenlight this project. Even if he was an opinionated but disinterested executive, who didn’t always take the time to understand the science, could he possibly have believed this would work?

Some wonder about his investors, who massively overvalued a fifth-generation eyeglass manufacturer with a yardstick meant for tech startups, and the pressures they must have exerted in their unreasonable pursuit of a 10x ROI. Whatever the case, in the years leading up to 2018, Helmut prepared the Lorentz+Esser company for its sesquicentennial by planning a series of instruments that would at last verify Eugene Wigner’s 1961 theory of superposition, which proposes that two observers can experience the same reality in conflicting ways. Wigner had of course been theorizing about quantum physics, not the Newtonian world visible under glass, but Esser was apparently undeterred. When the three-scope version of his Multimodal EsserScope failed to deliver, Esser scrapped it for a unit with four eyepieces, and then five, and finally nine, an unwieldy mechanical octopus barely operable even by researchers in the most intimate huddle. Needless to say, the product never launched, and the company's shareholders removed Esser from office. A bittersweet footnote came just one year later, when scientists at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh proved Wigner’s conjecture, without even using a simple Esser No. 1 magnifying glass.

Published December 17, 2022. Copyright © 2022 Jonathan Hoefler.