Mackwheaton: Hurdles are barriers that are intended to be cleared, so I believe it a very appropriate use of the term and in their world, a challenge that they indeed savor.

I remember well that I used the word "hurdle" in my phone call with Subhash in April. That phone call followed that famous news release reticently titled "POET Operations Update". Almost nobody really understood that news release and it raised a lot of questions.

My question to Subhash was whether we could say that with the detector and – even more important – the way it has been manufactured, the last technological hurdle on the road to mass-production has been taken. Subhash thought for a second and then agreed. See my report on that phone call.

Since then, we are what is now called "out of physics and into engineering". All fundamental problems have been solved, all hurdles have been cleared, all road blocks have been removed. All we still have to do is drive down that road and that will take some time. We might not know whether it is 30 or 60 kilometers long, it might be winding, it might have some unexpected turns, but as long as we have enough fuel in our tank we can certainly make it.