Attendees at this year’s Lux Executive Summit (pdf) will get to tour Harvard’s Center for Nanoscale Systems. As an alumna of the rival school down the street (MIT), I suggest that while you’re there, you help tweak their website, which has one of the least impressive nano definitions I’ve seen:
The term nanoscale refers to structures that can be measured in nanometers (one billionth of a meter or 0.000000001 meters), from the atomic scale (angstroms) to the cellular scale (tens of microns.)
Hardly anyone would refer to structures measuring tens of microns as nanoscale. Less important: anything with a length can be measured in nanometers. Finally: the period belongs outside the parentheses.
But this is all in good fun — most websites have something embarrassing on them, including ours. To be serious: we at Foresight are fans of the work done at Harvard’s CNS, especially by Foresight Institute Feynman Prize winner Charles Lieber. And the upcoming Laboratory for Integrated Science and Engineering looks quite impressive too. This shows what can be done by a school with a US$25 billion endowment.—Christine
