München 2019 – scientific programme

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GP: Fachverband Geschichte der Physik

GP 12: Technological development of tools of physics

GP 12.2: Talk

Wednesday, March 20, 2019, 17:00–17:30, HS 9

Indeterminate Identity: Development & Diversification of the Most Widely Influential Tool of Physics — •Keith Nier — Madison, NJ, USA

A tool of inquiry that emerged in the beginning of the twentieth century in the investigation of a particular area of research in physics has been developed and diversified so greatly during the past hundred-plus years that it has become the most widely influential tool of physics throughout the realm of research in the natural sciences. It thus has become an important aspect of the unity of natural science. This tool of physics is mass spectrometry. It was developed at first as a way to investigate certain rays produced by electrical discharge in partial vacuum. It was transformed into a various other things, the most prominent among them for some decades being techniques for determining the masses of atomic nuclei. That task was very important in the development of nuclear physics through much of the twentieth century but in more recent decades it has become comparatively rare. However, starting in the time when this role in physics still was fundamental, experimenters modified mass spectrometers through both improvements and replacements of components and by re-directing their application. These metamorphoses have made the same basic type of instrument highly important in fields from astro- and geo-physics through materials science, chemistry, physiology, ecology, and on beyond the natural sciences as well. As the main directions of these developments are traced, continuing connections can be discerned through all the diversification.