• Question: what do you mean by instruments that you design?

    Asked by anon-252071 to Tom on 27 Apr 2020.
    • Photo: Tom Louth

      Tom Louth answered on 27 Apr 2020:

      They are scientific instruments, not musical ones. We call anything that we use to measure something during an experiments an instrument. My ones are used to measure light that has come from the stars and galaxies that the telescopes are pointed at.

      Imagine putting a camera up to the eyepiece of a telescope and taking a picture. My instruments are basically really, really expensive cameras.

Comments

  • Photo: Susan

    Susan commented on :

    An instrument is a piece of equipment that measures something (for example, an ammeter) or a piece of equipment that does something (for example, surgical instruments, i.e. scalpels and the like). Scientific instruments are generally the measuring kind. Some scientific instruments you can buy off the shelf – an oscilloscope, for example – but if you are doing cutting-edge research you may need to measure something with a precision more accurate than anything you can buy, or you may even be trying to measure something that nobody has ever measured before. In that case, you will need to design your own instrument. One of my astronomer colleagues has designed a special kind of camera that attaches to a telescope to take extremely short exposures at a very high rate, as TV cameras do if they want to show slow motion: in this case, the aim is to study objects whose emission changes very quickly. There was no off-the-shelf camera that could do this, so he had to design and build it himself: that’s what “designing an instrument” means.

  • olegshebanits commented on :

    Instruments are just sophisticated tools. We want to do something specific with a defined precision – so we build a tool for the job. And we call it instrument.
    They often have to be built custom for every occasion because the environment is different, or the task is different – but the principle may be the same, so the past experience is useful.
    Example: Telescopes. In the beginning people just wanted to see very far, so an arrangement of lenses in a tube was invented. Then people realised that lenses distort light as well as magnify, and started to use bent mirrors. Nowadays, a telescope can have very different looks from the original “tube with an ocular” design – it can be just a huge antenna dish for radio signals, or even a group of antennas. It all depends on which frequency we want to detect, from visible light to x-rays.
    And we started to use cameras instead of our own eyes, because we can make them very precise, so that they distinguish a lot of frequencies – and so we call them “spectrometers” because they measure a range of frequencies – a spectra.
    All of this was designed by someone. Even our most trivial tools, like hammers, all went through the development process.