What are the importance of instruments in chemical industry?

Answer 1

Scientific instruments may be usefully regarded as the capital goods of the research industry. That is to say, the conduct of scientific research generally requires some antecedent investment in specific equipment for purposes of enhancing the ability to observe and measure specific categories of natural phenomena. Moreover, much of the scientific instrumentation that is now in existence had its historical origins in the conduct of basic research - specifically, in the attempt to advance the frontier of scientific knowledge through an expansion in observational or experimental capabilities. In this sense, a central part of the "output" of the university research enterprise has been much more than just new theories explaining some aspects of the structure of the universe, or additional data confirming or modifying existing theories. A further output (or by-product) has been more powerful and versatile techniques of instrumentation including, in many cases, the ability to observe or measure phenomena that were previously not observable or measurable at all. New instrumentation has thus often been an unintentional and, to a surprising extent, even an unacknowledged, product of university research.

A common denominator among a wide range of scientific instruments is that they were initially designed in response to some very specific, narrowly defined requirement of research in a particular discipline. However, after their successful development, it became apparent that the instrument had useful applications in some other scientific realm - whether basic or applied - often requiring substantial modification or redesign. The analogy with more conventional capital goods should be apparent here. Machine tools originally designed to meet the specific requirements of textile or locomotive or musket manufacturers were later transferred to manufacturers of sewing machines, bicycles, typewriters, and automobiles. Such transfers have been numerous and diverse. [2] Similarly, scientific instruments designed to improve technical capability or to solve one set of research problems have often turned out to have applications in disciplines and technology sectors far from those where they originated. The most spectacular of such transfers has involved the computer. Computers are, of course, the scientific instrument par excellence; their origins can be traced to research conducted in several countries, although the research context from which they originally sprang is now largely forgotten. In the past thirty years, computers have become indispensable wherever extensive calculations are made - which is to say everywhere in the scientific world. The demand for greater calculating capability turned out to be enormous when the cost of computing was reduced by many orders of magnitude. The computer has made possible many kinds of research activities that would have been simply impossible if computational costs and capabilities had remained frozen at the levels which prevailed at the outbreak of the Second World War. Moreover, much of the progress in research capability in the past couple of decades has occurred by linking other new scientific instruments to the computer. This includes computer control of a wide range of experiments that could hardly have been undertaken in its absence. In addition, the availability of powerful computers has opened up the possibility of large-scale simulation of physical and biological processes.

At the same time, the computer has spread into uses in business, government, medical care, and private households which are extremely remote from its scientific points of origin, and certainly very far from the specific purposes that dominated the thinking of the pioneers of computing. A quick stroll, for example, through the intensive care unit of any major hospital will disclose a number of essential technologies that are directly dependent upon the computer for the continuous monitoring of vital signs: blood pressure, respiratory rate, pulse rate, and cardiac rhythm.

A common denominator among many of the pioneers in developing the computer - Howard Aiken at Harvard, John Atanasoff at Iowa State University, Konrad Zuse in the German aircraft industry, and John P. Eckert, Jr. and John W. Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania - is that their contributions resulted from the fact that they were confronted by extremely tedious and time-consuming computational requirements in their research work, typically involving solutions to large systems of differential equations. [3] Interest in useful applications of this capability outside the sphere of research (including military R&D during the Second World War) was, for a long time, limited or non-existent. [4]

Answer 2

importance of weather instrument