Spectrum Quotes (6)
At the moment I am occupied by an investigation with Kirchoff which does not allow us to sleep. Kirchoff has made a totally unexpected discovery, inasmuch as he has found out the cause for the dark lines in the solar spectrum and can produce these lines artificially intensified both in the solar spectrum and in the continuous spectrum of a flame, their position being identical with that of Fraunhofer’s lines. Hence the path is opened for the determination of the chemical composition of the Sun and the fixed stars.
Letter to H.E. Roscoe (Nov 1859). In The Life and Experiences of Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe (1906), 71.
See also: | Absorption Line (2) | Biography (152) | Composition (7) | Discovery (166) | Flame (7) | Kirchoff_Gustav (2) | Sleep (10) | Solar Spectrum (2) | Star (55) | Sun (37)
At the moment I am occupied by an investigation with Kirchoff which does not allow us to sleep. Kirchoff has made a totally unexpected discovery, inasmuch as he has found out the cause for the dark lines in the solar spectrum and can produce these lines artificially intensified both in the solar spectrum and in the continuous spectrum of a flame, their position being identical with that of Fraunhofer’s lines. Hence the path is opened for the determination of the chemical composition of the Sun and the fixed stars.
Letter to H.E. Roscoe (Nov 1859). In The Life and Experiences of Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe (1906), 81.
See also: | Absorption Line (2) | Biography (152) | Composition (7) | Discovery (166) | Flame (7) | Kirchoff_Gustav (2) | Sleep (10) | Solar Spectrum (2) | Star (55) | Sun (37)
Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.
Pro domo et Mundo, (1912) Chap. 4. In 'Riddles and Solutions', Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half-Truths: Selected Aphorisms, editted by Harry Zohn (1976), 47.
When it is considered that this light, when obtained with mercury gas, has an efficiency at least eight times as great as that obtained by an ordinary incandescent lamp, it will be appreciated that it has its use in places where lack of red is not important, for the economy of operation will much more than compensate for the somewhat unnatural color given to illuminated objects.
'Electric Gas Lamps and Gas Electrical Resistance Phenomena', a paper read at the 150th AIEE meeting 3 Jan 1902. In Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (1902), 61.
With crystals we are in a situation similar to an attempt to investigate an optical grating merely from the spectra it produces... But a knowledge of the positions and intensities of the spectra does not suffice for the determination of the structure. The phases with which the diffracted waves vibrate relative to one another enter in an essential way. To determine a crystal structure on the atomic scale, one must know the phase differences between the different interference spots on the photographic plate, and this task may certainly prove to be rather difficult.
Physikalische Zeitschrift (1913), 14. Translated in Walter Moore, Schrödinger. Life and Thought (1989), 73.
See also: | Atom (85) | Crystal (7) | Determination (3) | Intensity (3) | Interference (2) | Investigation (25) | Knowledge (330) | Phase (3) | Photograph (4) | Position (3) | Scale (2) | Structure (33) | Wave (13)
[W]e pity our fathers for dying before steam and galvanism, sulphuric ether and ocean telegraphs, photograph and spectrograph arrived, as cheated out of their human estate.
'Works and Days', Emerson's Complete Works (1883), 152.
See also: | Invention (84) | Photography (2) | Spectroscopy (5) | Steam Engine (13) | Telegraph (15)
