Book Description

All papers in this volume were peer reviewed by two reviewers for each paper. This volume describes recent developments in thermometry, process control, and related materials properties. Topics covered include: temperature standards; characterization and development of both common and novel thermometer types; uncertainties and calibration methods; results of recent international comparisons; hardware and methods for temperature control; and applications in the semiconductor and metal processing industries. ... Read more

Book Description

Presents the principles of using a small computer for laboratory automation as an aid in scientific experimentation. In language accessible to scientists in most fields, it provides the information needed to allow scientists to develop a powerful instrumentation system based on a personal computer. Describes the basic components of a small computer and the function of that computer in the laboratory. Goes on to show how the interface between computer and phenomena of an experiment can be approached at different levels using the information provided--for instance, description of a wide variety of sensors can lead the user toward the solution of many types of laboratory problems. Discusses several other types of problems commonly encountered in the experimental process, such as making a personal computer communicate with other devices, small computer graphics, and computational problems directly related to experimental data. ... Read more

Book Description

This fully updated edition surveys both old and new techniques, including chromosome microscopy, immunohistochemistry, fluorescence microscopy, image building, video microscopy, calcium and pH imaging, microinjection techniques, nanovid microscopy, and histomorphometry. ... Read more

Book Description

Incommensurability and Related Matters draws together some of the most distinguished contributors to the critical literature on the problem of the incommensurability of scientific theories. It addresses all the various problems raised by the problem of incommensurability, such as meaning change, reference of theoretical terms, scientific realism and anti-realism, rationality of theory choice, cognitive aspects of conceptual change, as well as exploring the broader implications of incommensurability for cultural difference. While it offers new work, and new directions of discussion, on the topic of incommensurability, the book also recapitulates the history of the discussion of the topic that has taken place within the literature on incommensurability. ... Read more

Book Description

The 20-cm (8-in) Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope is the most popular telescope in the world. This compact instrument revolutionized amateur astronomy and astrophotography, and more than ten thousand are purchased each year. Manly, a devotee and keen user of the Schmidt-Cassegrain, takes the telescope owner, in easy stages, through all aspects of using the telescope. He starts with techniques for viewing the Moon, then takes the observer through our planetary system, and on to the deep sky, where nebulae and galaxies are treated extensively. There are interesting projects to try, such as observing the nearest star and chasing eclipses. The book describes a full range oftelescope accessories and detectors together with advice on their use. The 40-page appendix is packed with hard-to-find practical information.Peter Manly is the author ofUnusual Telescopes (CUP, 1992). ... Read more

Reviews (8)

Excellent user's guide
As the author points out, the first economical 20 cm. S-C telescope by makers such as Celestron and Meade revolutionized amateur astronomy back in the 70's and 80's, and their influence is still being felt today. The telescope's design has many advantages over the competition, such as good portability, excellent control of optical distortions, and ease of use. The S-C telescope is distinguished by having a concave paraboloidal primary with a convex hyperboloidal secondary, compared to the Gregorian telescope with it's similarly paraboloidal primary but concave secondary, which produces an upright image, unlike the S-C which is inverted like most telescopes. The corrector plate on the front of the S-C corrects for spherical aberration.

This design is different from the little 3-inch Maksutov scopes from Questar. These use a hyperboloidal primary and secondary. The advantage to this arrangement is that the positive and negative surfaces act to cancel out various optical aberrations and distortions. My understanding is that the Celestron telescopes actually employ elliptical rather than paraboloidal optics, but anyway, tens of thousands of these scopes have proven their worth in the hands of new and experienced amateurs around the world for decades.

If you're an experienced amateur, many of the topics, especially on viewing various sky objects will already be familiar to you, but if you're a new amateur there is much good information here. The author starts out with a brief intro and history of the instrument and then proceeds to a discussion of how to get started in viewing using easy subjects such as the moon and planets, and then proceeds to more advanced and harder to locate subjects like nebulae, star clusters, double-stars, galaxies, and so on. For the intermediate and advanced amateur, there are chapters on special topics such as observing variable stars, asteroids, comets, and multiple Jovian eclipses.

The last half of the book has sections on some of the more modern accessories and topics aspects such as international networking, astrophotography, photometers, spectroscopy, televisions and image intensifiers. There is an extensive series of appendices on topics such as cleaning the corrector plate, how to align the polar axis, collimation of the S-C telescope, mount vibrations, a field operations packing checklist, astronomical nomenclature, and a list of dozens of the brightest stars and nearby stars.

The author's story about how he was the first person, using an amateur group of observers spread out over Arizona, to gather the necessary obsevational data to calculate the size of the asteroid Aglaja during it's occultation of a star, was interesting. And the section on astrophotography reminded me of my first experiences in that area in the early 70's using a 25 or 30-year old Exacta VX Thagee-Oresden camera. Overall this is an excellent user's and observer's guide that should be valuable to new and experienced observers alike.

Good Book, But Now Dated
This is a good introduction to the SC telescope, and when first published it helped to fill a great void. While most of the information in the book is still useful and valid, it needs an update to include the modern computer-enhanced SCT (GO TO scopes). I would love to see a new edition.

Good info., style takes some getting used to
There really are some genuine nuggets of wisdom in this book. One has to become accustomed, however, to the first-person narrative and the sometimes "I'm so cute" humor.

if you can look past the stylistic concerns, there's a lot here to like.

A good book
This is a very good book; at times humorous, and at times just plain warm-feeling! It deals with many aspects of SCT's , some chapters are a bit too thin for my tastes now.

Although I read it cover-to-cover already; I keep going back to it quite often..

great
MY REVEIW IS THAT THIS IS A GREAT BOOK ... Read more

Book Description

Temperature Measurement covers nearly every type of temperature measurement device, in particular, bimetallic thermometers, filled bulb and glass stem thermometers, thermistors, thermocouples, and thermowells. Includes suppliers and prices. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Evaluation and prediction of new materials at the top level
This contributed volume offers a unique spectrum of modern computational methods as applied to up-to-date problems of materials science. In a sense, it is the first such wide-ranging survey, covering tools of computational and quantum chemistry, molecular physics, solid state theory, etc. It is a necessity to every laboratory of fundamental materials science. The methods are applied to various attractive systems and topics like fullerenes, composites, semiconductors, fractals, nanotechnology:

Individual Chapters - - Ab Initio Studies of Compound Semiconductor Surfaces (T T Rantala) - Molecular-Dynamics Studies of Defects and Impurities in Bulk Semiconductors (S K Estreicher & P A Fedders) - Tight-Binding Molecular Dynamics Study of Structures and Dynamics of Carbon Fullerenes (C Z Wang et al.) - Computations of Higher Fullerenes ( Z Slanina et al.) - Relaxations of Charge Transfer and Photoexcitation in C60 and Polymers (X Sun et al.) - Ionic Charge Transport in Molecular Materials: Polymer Electrolytes (M A Ratner) - Computational Approaches in Optics of Fractal Clusters (V A Markel & V M Shalaev) - Local Fields' Localization and Chaos and Nonlinear-Optical Enhancement in Composites (M I Stockman) - Atomic Valences in Aperiodic Crystals Studies by the Bond Valence Method (S van Smaalen) - Surgace Light-Induced Drift (M A Vaksman) - Theoretical Treatment of Surface Adsorbates (L Nanai et al.) - Phase Conjugation Through Four-Wave Mixing (H F Arnoldus & T F George) - Electromagnetic Propagators in Micro- and Mesoscopic Optics (O Keller) - Nanoscale Materials: Conceptual and Computational Challenges (M V Ramakrishna)

Published by: World Scientific, Singapore 1999, ISBN 981-02-3325-6, 464pp ... Read more

Book Description

Between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries, there was created under the Yi Dynasty in Korea a remarkable series of astronomical instruments, star-charts and clocks. The present volume is the result of close collaboration between four distinguished historians of Asian science to demonstrate the context, purpose, nature and specific workings of these early scientific instruments. Specially commissioned drawings and other illustrations demonstrate their complexities of design and operation. A brief introduction is given to the Chinese background of Korean astronomy and astronomical instrument-making and to the renaissance of Korean astronomy in the early fifteenth century. In a detailed examination of the instruments made under the supervision of King Sejong in the 1430s, there is documentation of the re-equipping of the Royal Observatory, with identification of the individual instruments involved. A survey of the succeeding two centuries gives the background to Song Iyong's instrument, identified as a demonstrational armillary sphere in the Koryo University Museum. ... Read more

Book Description

This book is the proceedings of a workshop held at the European Southern Observatory in September 1999, the 4th workshop of a series, which concentrates on optical detectors for astronomy.Representatives from every leading manufacturer and all major astronomical observatories came together to present their work on Charged Coupled Devices (CCDs). The papers presented in these proceedings are concerned with the development, manufacture, testing, implementation, new techniques and applications of CCDs. Many discuss the electronics that are used to operate these detectors.Astronomical observatories are the most ambitious and aggressive users of optical detectors, more so than any other scientific discipline. Since the quantum efficiency and noise of a detector have a direct effect on the quality of science, the makers of astronomical CCD systems continually `push the envelope' of optical detection technology. The papers contained in these proceedings provide the reader with the state of the art in CCD technology and contain information on research and development efforts, for ground-based and space-based applications, that will continue for several years. ... Read more

Book Description

The Cosmic Inquirers gives a remarkable inside view of the people who helped to forge some of the most sensitive tools of modern science, the astronomical observatories.Based on interviews with pioneers in several fields of astronomy, this book recounts the efforts of scientists to promote, design, and build these magnificent instruments despite political and technical obstacles.The astronomers in these pages tell us, in their own words, about their struggles with Congress, NASA, and colleagues to obtain support and funding.They speak candidly about the demands that Big Science places on its practitioners, and about their personal ambitions and frustrations, the problems with their profession, and the direction of future research.

The Tuckers interweave into the fabric of their human story the scientific challenges posed by these observatories, most of which orbit about the earth’s obscuring atmosphere.These telescopes have probed the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to x-rays to gamma radiation, and have yielded a new understanding of phenomena as diverse as quasars, black holes, pulsars, and starburst galaxies. This book invites us to view these telescopes not merely as technological wonders but as the life’s labor and achievement of outstanding individuals. ... Read more

Book Description

Providing an all-in-one resource for the integrated laboratory program in organic, inorganic, analytical, and physical chemistry! This comprehensive resource exposes readers to a variety of topics in chemistry from an experimental point of view and helps educators who wish to run their own labs but who need background material. Includes descriptions of basic techniques and procedures in wet chemistry and instrumental areas. ... Read more

Book Description

LabTutor, a combined book and software system, provides an introduction to the principles and practice of laboratory data acquisition, experimental control, and data processing using any hardware/software system. It includes specific instructions and examples on how to use LabVIEW, a graphical programming language from National Instruments used for developing automated instrumentation systems. LabTutor allows new users to make effective use of laboratory computers with as little as ten hours of effort and to become accomplished practitioners with less than forty hours of effort.The printed version offers the convenience and readability of an ordinary book, while the hypertext version includes sound and animation to clarify certain concepts and offers the advantage of rapid searching, making it useful as an online manual.LabTutor can be used as a primary package for a course on laboratory computers, as a supplement in traditional laboratory courses, or as a self-guided tutorial for those learning to use laboratory computers on their own. ... Read more