Many thanks for the correction (which has been made) – embarrassed that it appeared in the first place!

The images were taken from the internet and placed on the same slide – I’ll dig up the source and send it to you via email.

The Lycurgus Cup uses DICHROIC glass, not dichloric glass. As a warm glass artist, I use dichroic glass in a lot of my work.

I discovered your (excellent, BTW) blog while looking for images of the Lycurgus Cup. Could you possibly tell me the source of the image you have used? I would like to get permission to use that image in my website and brochure when explaining dichroic glass and its history.

Thanks,
Carol

You made the rather bold statement that while science and technology are going to have a highly visible impact on our lives over the next few decades, progress is going to be underpinned in most cases by our increasing control over materials at the inv…

http://tinyurl.com/dnchd9

Myer

“The main thing to know about nanotechnology is that it’s small. Really small. Nano, a prefix that means “dwarf” in Greek, is shorthand for nanometer, one-billionth of a meter: a distance so minute that comparing it to anything in the regular world is a bit of a joke. This comma, for instance, spans about half a million nanometers. To put it another way, a nanometer is the amount a man’s beard grows in the time it takes him to lift a razor to his face.”

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2006/06/nanotechnology/kahn-text/2

I’ve been known to compare the difference between the human scale and the nanoscale to the difference in size of the moon and Twinkie -but it only works for some audiences, and even then gets tired rather fast!

http://www.penmedia.org/video/maynard.html

And as @myerberlow pointed out on Twitter, George Whitesides approach to explaining the nanoscale is helpful – although I disagree with him that a human hair is at the limits of what can be resolved with the naked eye:

http://tinyurl.com/dnchd9

You blew my cover – I was attempting to write about the ideas surrounding nanotechnology without using the term “nanotechnology” – which comes with rather a lot of baggage

This is a tough thing to explain, in part because everything is happening at a scale smaller our brains are programmed to deal with, and in part because the reasons why we are doing this tend to be a little woolly.

And on the scale thing – I’m not yet convinced that trying to explain how small the nanoscale is is that useful (although I’m as guilty as the next person in having my favorite scale analogies).

In particular, the thing about a nanometer being 100,000 times smaller than a human hair underwhelms me – it never seems that big a deal! Human hairs are pretty fat, all things considered – I can see individual hairs on someone’s head from a few feet away, so they are not that small. And something that is 100,000 times smaller than something I can easily see with my naked eyes doesn’t sound that impressive!

But I may be wrong about this – if anyone out there is impressed by the idea of something that is 100,000 times smaller than one of your hairs on your head (assuming you have any), let me know.