- What later technologies trace their roots back to the Zeeman effect?
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance
Spectroscopy and imaging based on nuclear spin.
- How does the Zeeman effect connect to the technology behind modern MRI scanners?
- What modern technologies, like MRI scanners, depend on the superconductivity Onnes first observed in mercury?
- What modern technologies depend on materials cooled near absolute zero?
- How does the molecular beam magnetic resonance method reveal the magnetic moment of an atomic nucleus?
- What is the connection between Rabi's resonance technique and the invention of MRI decades later?
- Why do atomic nuclei absorb and then re-emit radio-frequency energy when placed in a strong magnetic field?
- Why is hydrogen the most useful nucleus for exploiting nuclear magnetic resonance in the human body?
- Why was nuclear magnetic resonance renamed 'MRI' for clinical use?
- How did Bloch and Purcell arrive at the same discovery independently within months of each other?
- How does nuclear magnetic resonance, originally a chemistry technique, get turned into a way of imaging the inside of a living body?
- What did Raymond Damadian's INDOMITABLE machine actually produce on 3 July 1977, and how long did the scan take?
- Why is MRI able to reveal tumours, strokes, and torn ligaments that X-rays and CT scans cannot?
- Why were the earliest nuclear magnetic resonance instruments so slow at characterising molecules?
- How did Ernst's pulse-and-Fourier-transform method speed up NMR measurement?
- What did two-dimensional NMR make possible for studying protein structure?
- How did Weijmar Schultz and colleagues use MRI to study human anatomy during intercourse?
- What technical challenges did researchers face imaging inside an MRI scanner bore?
- What did the study confirm or correct about prior anatomical assumptions?
- Why did Abrikosov and Ginzburg's theory of quantised magnetic filaments make high-field superconducting magnets possible?
- Why was nuclear magnetic resonance useless for imaging before Paul Lauterbur's 1973 insight?
- How does varying the magnetic field in a gradient allow different points in a sample to be located precisely?
- What did Peter Mansfield's echo-planar technique contribute to making MRI clinically useful?
- How many MRI scans are performed worldwide each year as a result of this work?