Question: what is your favourite invention and what does it do?

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  1. Generally: Google
    Impact on my life: How to make electricity – so “electromagnetic induction” on a big scale
    Impact on human history: Technologies behind the wide availability of clean water
    In my work: Something called an NMR Spectrometer. NMR stands for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance – exactly the same idea as an “MRI” scanner in medicine, but applied to chemical samples. This machine analyses molecules by blasting them with radiation and then looking at the energy the molecules gives off. Like hitting a bell then listening. The result is a piece of paper with lines on it that you can look at and work out what the molecule is. This is AMAZINGLY useful. Without it we would never have made such progress in chemistry, discovered so many useful drugs to treat diseases, or how a lot of biology works. My students use this machine every day – we have quite a few of them, and they cost around $1M each. But *totally* worth it.

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