Scientists create thinnest pane of glass ever, and it looks familiar

It's where Watson and Crick announced that they'd discovered the 'secret of life'. :3

In fact I know the site at 50:00 far better, it's the Centre for Mathematical Sciences where some lectures and supervisions (personal tutorials) are held, and where all the maths pros do their research. The roof of the main building is in the shape of a bell curve, and everything has some kind of geometric meaning... then when you get inside you are quite liable to be held up for about ten minutes every few paces, because they have displays of these awesome mathematical objects (representing groups or topology or whatnot). It's pretty sweet.

Have you ever been run down by Stephen Hawking? I hear he's quite the madman with his wheelchair.

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Originally Posted by PhilosopherStoned

1) no it's not "two dimensional". It's three atoms thick so it would have to have no width or no length to be considered 2-d.
2) "glass theorist"? That's a funny phrase.

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It can mean 2-dimensional with respect to some processes, like electron transport. Also, it can mean "can't be thinner". You can't have a sheet of graphene, for example, that's thinner than the width of a carbon atom.

I'm so jealous of your intellectual environment; I'm surrounded by engineers. D:

@cmind, I would consider that an abuse of terminology but I can see that being the case. The problem is that you are describing systems that can be modeled on two dimensions. That doesn't make the system itself 2d.

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Originally Posted by PhilosopherStoned

@cmind, I would consider that an abuse of terminology but I can see that being the case. The problem is that you are describing systems that can be modeled on two dimensions. That doesn't make the system itself 2d.

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Well, it's not an abuse of terminology given the context. Not all sciences must conform to a strictly geometric view of reality. For example, quantum mechanics doesn't really benefit from being able to picture the subatomic particles as physical objects with a set size and shape. It's just a jargon thing. If anything, it's the journalists' fault for not making the context more clear in their articles.