WSU physicist Phil Marston was intrigued by the way an acoustic beam is scattered by a sphere.
“Basically, it goes into the category of a problem you solve because it would be curious to see what the answer is and whether there is something there that you didn’t anticipate,” he says. “That was true.”
In the serpentine path from abstract musing to basic science to demonstrated phenomenon, he sowed the seeds for a small-scale but real-life tractor beam that could have applications in both nanotechnology and medicine.