Serendipity is often midwife to discovery.
Then Ajay Sood , visiting from the Indian Institute of Science, asked Merlin about looking at second-order coherence, the amount of variability in the positions of the atoms in a lattice. But when he worked out the equations, he realized they indicated a quantum state with no classical analogue. Intrigued, he visited his colleague, theorist Alberto Rojo . Rojo was primed. When Rojo saw the equation that had so intrigued Merlin, he knew right off what he had.