Felix Bloch

Nobel Prize in Physics lecture, 11th December 1952:

“To follow the analogue of mechanical resonance we must now come back to relaxation, which can be seen to act like a friction, and which counteracts the tilt produced by the alternating field.”

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Marinus T. Vlaardingerbroek / Jacques A. den Boer

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (Springer)

“Only a quarter of a century after the invention of MRI one may expect that in the developed countries there will be about one MRI system for every 10⁵ inhabitants.”

The Spin Zoo

MR-Physics, Department of Medical Radiology, University Hospital of Basel

“Some people believe that spins are just a quantum mechanical property of nuclei. However, spins are very small but lovely animals. And they like magnetic fields. We have collected some spins that used to live in our MR scanner, and we put them into our spin zoo.”

See the Spin Zoo, and click on the .gif file links for animation of magnetisation vector evolutions.

Malcolm H. Levitt

Spin Dynamics (Wiley)

“One can speculate how long it would have taken humanity to discover the magnetic field, if naturally occuring pieces of ferromagnetic iron from meteorites did not exist.”

Erwin Louis Hahn

in 1949

“There is nothing that nuclear spins will not do for you, as long as you treat them as human beings.”