Shardlow and Chard publish latest work

Last week saw the publication of Shardlow and Chard's opus on adaptive interferometry. The work has been hailed as a grand treatise, presenting for the first time ever the entire body of mankind's knowledge on the subject of optical metrology with speckled beams. Among its thick and numerous leather-bound volumes are detailed every equation, technique, and in-joke that the would-be vibrometrist needs to become his own virtuoso in the art of remote vibration measurement.

The tome is a culmination of a year's work by the two physicists, in which the writers' lives famously suffered greatly as their devotion to the cause deepened. Chard described the ordeal. "Some days we would take data for anything up to three hours at a time. Three hours staring at an oscilloscope does strange things to a man; by the end of it the only people I could only recognise were those who ran past me really quickly from left to right, and were bright green. It made it very hard to hold down a conversation. "The project also led to the Chard's well-documented problems with alcohol. “We would go to the pub after lab and drink up to as much as a pint of ale each. I was a mess."

But it was worth it. The centrepiece of the work has been the development of the Shardlow-Chard Interferometer. Described in full detail across volumes 11-14, the Shardlow-Chard marks a revolution in optical metrology. With unparalleled accuracy it can detect vibrations off any surface, regardless of speckle. "We could point this thing at anything and it worked”, Shardlow described. “It's so sensitive; we pointed it at a mouse and detected it shivering on a cold winter's day."

The book has received rave reviews the world over, from physics to gangsta rap. Steven Hawking described the work as "totally fucking badass", Lord Robert Winston exclaimed "this is some crazy shit", while Snoop Dog was quoted to say "I opine that this work is endowed with an eloquence of expression seen so sparsely in contemporary academia." In addition, the head of the group where the work was carried out confirmed "I'm [going to give you full marks] for [this project]".