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I write for the science blogging collective The Last Word on Nothing - here are some of my favourite posts

Science Metaphors: Hysteresis

My first encounter with the word “hysteresis” was ten years ago when I was editing a particularly difficult electrical engineering feature. That story was one of my favourite I’ve ever worked on, the wild first-person account of the researcher who had unearthed an ancient prediction of a fourth circuit design element, foretold by the laws of mathematical symmetry to augment the holy trinity of electrical circuit design elements: the resistor, the capacitor and the inductor.

What distinguished this fourth mythical element – today known as the “memristor” – from its workaday siblings was its behaviour, which depended more on its history than on any stimulus hitting it at any given moment. This tendency is called hysteresis, and the makers of memristors hope it will make the computers of the future act more human.

But what did that actually mean? Even after months of editing this thing with several of the world’s best electrical engineers at my disposal, I couldn’t wrap my head around the concept. They explained it to me every way they could, including comparing it to the behaviour of a synapse: the connections between neurons can become stronger or weaker depending on the number of electrical signals they’ve traded in the past. They sent me this graph of a bowtie.

The Fraud Finder: A Conversation with Elisabeth Bik

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Feature 3

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