Spectroscopy Quotes

An attempt to study the evolution of living organisms without reference to cytology would be as futile as an account of stellar evolution which ignored spectroscopy.

A stars rich in europium; of distant galaxies analyzed through the collective light of a hundred billion constituent stars. Astronomical spectroscopy is an almost magical technique. It amazes me still. Auguste Comte picked a particularly unfortunate example.

Look here, I have succeeded at last in fetching some gold from the sun. {After his banker questioned the value of investigating gold in the Fraunhofer lines of the sun and Kirchhoff handing him over a medal he was awarded for his investigations.}

One could make a compelling argument that we know more about the universe than the marine biologist knows about the bottom of the ocean or the geologist knows about the center of Earth. Far from an existence as powerless stargazers, modern astrophysicists are armed to the teeth with the tools and techniques of spectroscopy, enabling us all to stay firmly planted on Earth, yet finally touch the stars (without burning our fingers) and claim to know them as never before.

He walked back to St George's-in-the-East, which in his mind he had now reduced to a number of surfaces against which the murderer might have leaned in sorrow, desperation or even, perhaps, joy. For this reason it was worth examining the blackened stones in detail, although he realised that the marks upon them had been deposited by many generations of men and women. It was now a matter of received knowledge in the police force that no human being could rest or move in any area without leaving some trace of his or her identity; but if the walls of the Wapping church were to be analysed by emission spectroscopy, how many partial or residual spectra might be detected? And he had an image of a mob screaming to be set free as he guided his steps towards the tower which rose above the houses cluttered around Red Maiden Lane, Crab Court and Rope Walk.

A hundred years ago, Auguste Comte, … a great philosopher, said that humans will never be able to visit the stars, that we will never know what stars are made out of, that that's the one thing that science will never ever understand, because they're so far away. And then, just a few years later, scientists took starlight, ran it through a prism, looked at the rainbow coming from the starlight, and said: "Hydrogen!" Just a few years after this very rational, very reasonable, very scientific prediction was made, that we'll never know what stars are made of.

After the discovery of spectral analysis no one trained in physics could doubt the problem of the atom would be solved when physicists had learned to understand the language of spectra. So manifold was the enormous amount of material that has been accumulated in sixty years of spectroscopic research that it seemed at first beyond the possibility of disentanglement. An almost greater enlightenment has resulted from the seven years of Röntgen spectroscopy, inasmuch as it has attacked the problem of the atom at its very root, and illuminates the interior. What we are nowadays hearing of the language of spectra is a true 'music of the spheres' in order and harmony that becomes ever more perfect in spite of the manifold variety. The theory of spectral lines will bear the name of Bohr for all time. But yet another name will be permanently associated with it, that of Planck. All integral laws of spectral lines and of atomic theory spring originally from the quantum theory. It is the mysterious organon on which Nature plays her music of the spectra, and according to the rhythm of which she regulates the structure of the atoms and nuclei.

Here Boltzmann is referring to the fact that an atom cannot be a simple object, as was amply known in his time from spectroscopy. It was the study of this structure that paved the way to the theory of elementary particles in the twentieth century. These are the bricks from which one builds atoms and may derive a force between atoms of the kind imagined by Boscovich.

Newton was a decidedly odd figure – brilliant beyond measure, but solitary, joyless, prickly to the point of paranoia, famously distracted (upon swinging his feet out of bed in the morning he would reportedly sometimes sit for hours, immobilized by the sudden rush of thoughts to his head), and capable of the most riveting strangeness. He built his own laboratory, the first at Cambridge, but then engaged in the most bizarre experiments. Once he inserted a bodkin – a long needle of the sort used for sewing leather – into his eye socket and rubbed it around ‘betwixt my eye and the bone as near to [the] backside of my eye as I could’ just to see what would happen. What happened, miraculously, was nothing – at least, nothing lasting. On another occasion, he stared at the Sun for as long as he could bear, to determine what effect it would have upon his vision. Again he escaped lasting damage, though he had to spend some days in a darkened room before his eyes forgave him. Set atop these odd beliefs and quirky traits, however, was the mind of a supreme genius-though even when working in conventional channels he often showed a tendency to peculiarity. As a student, frustrated by the limitations of conventional mathematics, he invented an entirely new form, the calculus, but then told no one about it for twenty-seven years. In like manner, he did work in optics that transformed our understanding of light and laid the foundation for the science of spectroscopy, and again chose not to share the results for three decades.

largest study to look at this phenomenon, involving nearly five thousand men who were treated with external-beam radiation alone, found that the PSA bounce did not seem to raise the risk of local failure or distant metastases. However, because of this PSA bounce, the ASTRO consensus definition may falsely identify some of these men as having a relapse—again, leading to unnecessary anxiety. Preliminary research using magnetic resonance spectroscopy imaging (MRSI) suggests that the bounce may actually be caused by inflammation of the prostate after radiation. MRSI is also being investigated as a means to determine whether what’s happening with a man’s PSA is a bounce, or a return of cancer. Another study, published in the Journal

I had been fascinated by such partnerships even as a boy; in my chemical days, I read about the partnership of Kirchhoff and Bunsen and how their very different minds, together, were indispensable for the discovery of spectroscopy.

the late 1940s and early 1950s the perception of a warming became more widespread both in the scientific community and in the popular mind. Articles speculating about a warming appeared in such magazines as The Saturday Evening Post, Time Magazine, and the New York Times Sunday Magazine.22 Research on infrared spectroscopy was advancing as a result of cold war research on heat-seeking missiles and other advanced weaponry. As more of the structure of Tyndall’s blanket was revealed, it became clear that the absorption spectrum of CO2 and water vapor do not entirely overlap, and that water vapor occurs mostly in the lower layers of the troposphere while CO2 is more evenly distributed even high into the stratosphere. Thus, radiant heat that is not absorbed by water vapor in the lower troposphere can still be absorbed by the CO2 above it.

Radio-frequency spectroscopy of body fluid

Theoretical and experimental physicists, working on problems of esoteric intellectual interest, provided the knowledge that eventually was pulled together to make the H-bomb, while mathematicians, geophysicists, and metallurgists, wittingly or unwittingly, made the discoveries necessary to construct intercontinental ballistic missiles. Physicists doing basic work in optics and infrared spectroscopy may have been shocked to find that their research would help government and corporate engineers build detection and surveillance devices for use in Indochina. The basic research of molecular biologists, biochemists, cellular biologists, neuropsychologists, and physicians was necessary for CBW (chemical-biological warfare) agents, herbicides, and gaseous crowd-control devices… Anthropologists studying social systems of mountain tribes in Indochina were surprised when the CIA collected their information for use in counterinsurgency operations. Psychologists explored the parameters of human intelligence-testing instruments which, once developed, passed out of their hands and now help the draft boards conscript men for Vietnam and the U.S. Army allocate manpower more effectively. Further, these same intelligence-testing instruments are now an integral part of the public school tracking systems that, beginning at an early age, reduce opportunities of working-class children for higher education and social mobility

The story of the Eridania Basin and the possible scientific promise it holds was pieced together by using the results from different instruments on different spacecraft over many years, spanning several scientific disciplines: geology, chemistry, spectroscopy, laser altitude ranging and photography. The estimate of the age of the surface required the Apollo lunar rock samples from 50 years ago, and radiometric dating techniques which require an understanding of nuclear physics. The estimate of the age of the surface requires a model of the entire Solar System in order to interpret the measured crater density, which illustrates another important idea. The Solar System is a system; no planet is an island; no planet can be understood in isolation, just as the structure of any one living thing on Earth cannot be understood in isolation. Organisms are a product of evolution by natural selection, the interaction of the expression of genetic mutations and mixing with other organisms, in the ecosystem and the wider environment. The planets formed in a chaotic maelstrom from motions as random as the impact of a cosmic ray on a strand of primordial DNA, and whatever worlds emerged from the chaos have had their histories shaped profoundly by their mutual interactions throughout their evolution; the Late Heavy Bombardment is a beautiful example.

investigators had identified Baxter’s heparin as the source of the contamination, and the Changzhou plant as deficient, neither the FDA nor Baxter could find any contaminant in the heparin. Urgently needing help to figure out what was wrong with its own product, Baxter reached out to Dr. Robert Linhardt, a chemist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, who had been studying heparin for years. He promptly sidelined his other work to dig into the mystery, and his laboratory joined several others working on the crisis. Stumped, the research teams finally turned to sophisticated nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy machines, which revealed evidence of a contaminant: a synthetic substance called oversulfated chondroitin sulfate (OSCS). The ingredient mimicked heparin, was almost impossible to detect, and produced life-threatening reactions. The FDA formally named OSCS as a likely contaminant in March 2008 and concluded that it had been added, somewhere along the supply chain, to increase the yield, and profitability, of the drug. The contamination exposed perilous gaps in the FDA’s oversight and intensified the long-simmering conflict between Congress and the agency.