There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom: Size Effects on the Small Scale in Chemistry and Physics
Jour fixe talk by Klaus Boldt on May 2, 2018
Klaus Boldt is a Research Fellow at the Zukunftskolleg affiliated with the Department of Chemistry.
We as humans have evolved to deal with objects and numbers on an intermediate scale. If sizes are very small or very large phenomena become strange to our perception, because our common sense fails to reconcile them with what our brain is used to. This is true for many disciplines in the physical sciences, mathematics, and social sciences. In his presentation, Klaus gave an overview over how the physical and chemical properties of materials change when their size is reduced to the nanometre scale. Three example at the length scale of 1000 to 1 nm were discussed. The two major factors that determine the behaviour, surface-to-volume ratio and quantum effects, were highlighted, as well as methodological approaches to study size effects in the physical sciences.
This Jour Fixe presentation is part of the special Jour fixe series "Size", organised by Carolin Antos-Kuby (Research Fellow/Dept. of Philosophy), Janina Beiser-McGrath (Postdoctoral Fellow/Dept. of Politics and Public Administration) and Klaus Boldt (Research Fellow/Dept. of Chemistry).