Abstract
AN interesting account of the debt of modern physics to recent instruments comes from the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York and is given by Karl K. Darrow (Review of Scientific Instruments, 12, 1-10; Jan.; 53-61, Feb. 1941). The instruments are classified into three types according as they are devoted primarily, to observation, to measurement or to achieving new conditions. In the first article consideration is given to those instruments in which substances can be subjected to new combinations of physical forces or in which one variable is pushed to extreme limits. Bridgman's scheme for achieving pressures of the order of 100,000 atmospheres, Beams's ultracentrifuge rotating at more than 20,000 turns per second, the piezo-electric or magnetostriction oscillator, the Dickel and Clusius use of convection and thermal diffusion to separate isotopes, the attainment of vacua of the order of 10˜8 or 10˜9 mm. mercury, by the aid of oil diffusion pumps and ‘getters', the attainment of temperatures of only a few hundredths of a degree absolute, and of high electric voltages, and magnetic field strengths are all dealt with. The second article is devoted to instruments of observation and instruments of measurement without enforcing too sharp a distinction to the two types. Both articles are well illustrated and give an excellent idea of the present limits reached in most branches of modern physics. The developments in that protean tool, the thermionic vacuum valve, and its resulting developments in acoustics are so great that another article would have been necessary to deal with them.
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New Instruments in Physics. Nature 147, 539 (1941). https://doi.org/10.1038/147539c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/147539c0