There’s a fantastic story about Isidor Rabi (I think), who won the Nobel Prize for his work on nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). NMR is an indispensable technique in chemical analysis, and also the basis of MRI scanners in hospitals. This story shows that Rabi must have had the admirable trait of being secure enough in […]
Category: Semi-philosophical!
What does 4380 mean? Or, how much coffee is in a half-pound bag of coffee…?
The number 4380 got picked from a random pressing of the numeric keypad. It could be any number. We’re going to discuss the semi-random number, 4380, as a way to get, maybe, a fresh insight into what numbers do. Numbers for counting The first thing to say is that 4380, as written (and we’ll write […]
Trying to visualise a nanometre
Working in science, and more recently in science communication, I frequently find myself working in the nano-world – wavelengths measured in nanometres, nanostructures, forces that act over unimaginably short length scales. I never used to question these distances – they were all just numbers followed by ‘nm’. Recently, however, after thinking about various topics to write […]