Customer Reviews

Building Scientific Apparatus

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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My son chose to enter this year's science fair with an advance project that required vacume chamber construction, optics, and the original charged particle detection systems. This book is a perfect guide towards building most any mid-level research instrument.

This book is an invaluable resource for any experimentalist. It's a startingly dense yet readable distillation of the information you really need to have at your fingertips if you're going to make an experiment work. The emphasis is on breadth and need-to-know rather than depth; this book will not replace (nor does it pretend to replace) specialized books on the sub-topics, but for, say, an optics person wanting to know what to say to a machinist to get a job done quickly, efficiently, with appropriate materials and tolerances, and most of all, to have it all work at the end without breaking the budget . . . this is your book. Covers mechanical design, materials, optics (photon and electron varieties), electronics, and temperature control.

As the title implies, this book is an excellent reference. You can learn what materials you need to perform the experiments; you can even find the suppliers' names from the book. Excellent!

No lab should be without a copy of this book! It has everything from lasers, to optical mounts, sand casting, screws, glass work, etc...

this is a great book to design and build instruments. It will give you a quick background on pretty much every thing you need to know for instrumentation. I'm a physicist by training, but I realized that when it comes to build stuff, there are many gaps in my 'tech' expertize. This book helps me fill those gaps.

I have a library of nearly 500 books on optics and this falls in the top 5. But this book not only covers optics (theoretical and practical, lens design to thin-film deposition), it also include topics such as vacuum physics (better than standard texts such as Harris), electronic design and mechanical design considerations.
Any inventor, systems engineer and instrument builder must have a copy of this book.

I recently purchased the updated edition of this book, after having owned the previous edition for many years. It is concise, well-written, expertly illustrated and thoroughly referenced.

The book covers a number of areas, all of which I've had occasion to use in my career as a materials scientist and chemist. The book is aimed at the practical aspects of design, construction and use of apparatus, primarily what might be termed "physics apparatus", but the principles may be applied to many scientific fields. It provides sufficient theory and mathematics necessary for an understanding of the designs, as well as pointing out common pitfalls.

When I am designing and building equipment this book is never out of reach.

This book is not too advanced but it covers a very large range of topics related to scientific aparatus. This book is indispensable to any physics or physical chemistry lab.

I had an early edition of this book and was very impressed with it, although some of the sections seemed a little dated. Now, with this new edition, the authors have done a fine job of updating the sections that have changed and added even more information and reference data to draw upon. I highly recommend this book if your a student in a lab or professional building out a new experiment or just basically want to some more in-depth knowledge on how to implement various scientific instruments.

We appear to exist in a society that does not encourage the ability to make physical objects with one's hands (living, as we are, in an age of software). This cultural bias, and the lack of training that goes with it, can put graduate students in the sciences, and physics in particular, at a serious disadvantage; since it is not always possible to have machinists or other technicians make the necessary equipment and parts. "Building Scientific Apparatus" goes a long way towards remedying this deficiency.

Any researcher in the physical sciences or engineering who wishes to build their own apparatus should have a look at this book. It should also be read by those who want to design apparatus themselves, and then have them made by technical staff in a workshop. (This is because the book discusses design, and also because it is important to know how apparatus is going to be made while one is designing it.) Even an experimentalist who does not fall into these two categories can benefit from the book, since a good general knowledge of how scientific equipment is made is often helpful when it is being used.

The book is comprehensive, clearly written, and beautifully illustrated - a very useful reference to have in a laboratory!