🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1989Oct29.174631.12960@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (Doug McDonald) writes:

>(Also, I might add, a lot of people refer to actual physical
>magnets, though not the fields they create, in megahertz - as
>in "it's a 500 MHz magnet" meaning, of course, that the NMR
>resonance frequency of protons in it would be 500 MHz." Even the
>people who do this snicker a bit while doing it, however.)
>
>Doug McDonald

   Ummm...  In the world of analytical chemistry and in some other areas
where large magnets are often in use the Tesla is used to measure large
fields.  For example, Nicolet Instruments, the company which currently holds
the patent on Fourier transform mass spectrometers, advertises all of their
magnets in Tesla values as do most other manufacturers in the analytical
chemistry market.
   In general, when I was working in analytical chemistry at UC Riverside,
the only place I heard the gauss values used was in the Bank of America's 
specification that credit cards were unsafe past the 50 gauss line.  The 
magnets were always, to us, thirteen, seven, and three TESLA.
   Of course, everybody also used "torr" to refer to "mm Hg," which people in
some fields would find odd.  I suppose the point is that just because your
area of work has different conventions than someone else's it isn't really
yours to say that some unit or another is NEVER, EVER used.

             -- Mark Wilkins
                wilkins@jarthur.claremont.edu