“A successful scientist must acquire many engineering skills in order to proceed efficiently with an experimental investigation.”
—Building Scientific Apparatus, third ed.
Any undergraduate or graduate student in the physical sciences is exposed to courses involving laboratory work. Naturally, this laboratory work often concentrates on the elucidation or confirmation of the principles of science learned in the classroom. There are also a number of other skills important to the experimental scientist, to be applied in the laboratory, which often take a backseat to the primary purpose of learning the theoretical foundations of science. These include skills in designing and fabricating the apparatus needed in experiments, performing simulations, understanding measurement and uncertainty, and understanding the nuances of data analysis and reporting results.
The links and books assembled below will help students to develop these skills and build a set of references to assist them in solving problems in the laboratory as a professional scientist.
John H. Moore, Christopher C. Davis, and Michael A. Coplan. Building Scientific Apparatus: A Practical Guide to Design and Construction, third ed. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 2003. 654pp.
This book is a wealth of information and written especially for the experimental scientist. It covers everything from basic use of hand tools to complicated techniques, and spans mechanical fabrication, electronics, glassworking, and vacuum technology, with especially extensive sections on optics and charged-particle optics. It includes invaluable information on materials and equipment manufacturers and copious illustrations. If you can have only one book on lab techniques and equipment, this is the one to buy.
John H. Strong. Procedures in Experimental Physics. Bradley, IL: Lindsay Publishing, 2006 (reprint). Originally published 1938. 642pp.
This is a classic text with detailed information for constructing scientific apparatus. It covers wider subject areas than Building Scientific Apparatus and offers more detailed how-to instructions, but is somewhat dated since it was originally published in 1938. Heavily illustrated.
Gary S. Coyne. The Laboratory Companion: A Practical Guide to Materials, Equipment, and Technique, revised ed. New York, NY: Wiley-Interscience, 1997. 552pp.
This book focuses on the equipment and techniques of laboratories, especially chemistry laboratories, and has extensive coverage of glassware. It also discusses vacuum, pressure, heat, cold, and measurement.
Ulrich Becker. “8.13–14 Experimental Physics I & II”, MIT OpenCourseWare. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2005.
MIT’s OpenCourseWare project provides course materials from MIT classes in a public repository. This course deals with experimental physics, and the course readings and reference materials contain excellent resources for data analysis and laboratory skills.
Joseph Walas. “Scientific Glassblowing Basics”. Greenville, NC: East Carolina University, 2003.
This website, produced by a scientific glassblower, provides an excellent introduction to the techniques of laboratory glassblowing for construction or repair. Very detailed, step-by-step instructions are included.
Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill. The Art of Electronics, second ed. Cambridge University Press, 1989. 1125pp.
This book is a classic text in electronics and contains explanations of the functions of electronics components as well as hundreds of detailed circuits, ranging from the extremely simple to circuits using programmable microcontrollers. Lucid and copiously illustrated.
Mike Papadimitriou. Electronics Lab. 2006.
This online community site contains a wealth of information on constructing electronics. This ranges from detailed project instructions to basic electronics principles, and includes articles and online courses to build skills such as soldering.
John R. Taylor. An Introduction to Error Analysis: The Study of Uncertainties in Physical Measurements, second edition. New York, NY: University Science Books, 1996. 327pp.
A text of remarkable clarity from an award-winning teacher. This book lucidly examines error and uncertainty in measurement. It is aimed at the student of the physical sciences and does not assume an extensive or rigorous mathematical foundation in statistics.
John G. Webster, ed. The Measurement, Instrumentation and Sensors Handbook. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 1998. 2608pp.
This weighty tome covers a vast breadth of information on sensing and measurement, including the hardware, software, techniques, and processing. If you want to know how to measure almost anything, just consult the appropriate section, written by an expert in that field.
“Resources for Sensors, Measurements, Instrumentation and related Sciences”. Basking Ridge, NJ: Sensors Research Consulting, Inc., 2006.
This page, maintained by a commercial consulting company, contains over 300 links to information on the web about sensors, measurements, and instrumentation in various fields.
(for information about measurement equipment, see also many of the references in “Shop Skills” above)
McMaster-Carr, industrial suppliers. 2006.
McMaster-Carr is the ultimate industrial supplier, with all kinds of materials, tools, and equipment. The website represents the most up-to-date information on the 435,000 items in the paper catalog, including detailed information about tolerances, dimensions, and other important data for scientific work.
Government Supplies & Equipment for Sale. FirstGov.gov, 2006.
This site lists surplus equipment available for sale from government agencies, including national research laboratories.
LabX.com, used scientific equipment and laboratory instruments. 2006.
This site provides auctions, classified ads, and links to used laboratory equipment and instruments. The site has been in existence for 10 years and approximately $60 million of equipment are sold via LabX annually.
Rubin Landau. A First Course in Scientific Computing: Symbolic, Graphic, and Numeric Modeling Using Maple, Java, Mathematica, and Fortran90. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. 472pp.
This text provides an excellent introduction to using computers to simulate physical science or using computational methods to solve scientific problems. It uses extensive examples from real-world science to acclimate students of the sciences to computer programming. Examples are provided in a variety of languages: simulation and numeric modeling using Java, which is currently very widespread, and Fortran, which is a traditional standby in numerical analysis; and symbolic computation using Maple and Mathematica, which have distinct approaches.
MATLAB documentation. Natick, MA: The MathWorks, 2006.
MATLAB is a commercial software tool that is indispensable to many mathematicians, physical scientists, and engineers. It is an environment for computation and modeling that is extremely flexible and robust. This documentation from the producer of the software is an extensive reference to the use of MATLAB.
Richard W. Hamming. The Art of Probability for Scientists and Engineers. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993. 364pp.
The author was a mathematician renowned for his pedagogical style, and this book makes the case for his reputation. The book explains the principles of probability for scientists and engineers, and provides lucid explanations of probability for simulation and statistical. This is useful to the student who wishes to learn about probability without a foundation in the subject as well as the practitioner seeking new insight.
William H. Press, Saul A. Teukolsky, William T. Vetterling, and Brian P. Flannery. Numerical Recipes in C, second ed. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
This book provides discussions of how to solve common numerical problems, and then shows examples of programs to do so in C. While it doesn’t teach programming or numerical analysis from scratch, it can be a very handy reference to build on the examples to solve your own problems.
John Mandel, The Statistical Analysis of Experimental Data. New York, NY: Dover Publications, 1984. 448pp. index. illus.
This book is a classic text, clearly explaining the mathematics and methods used to analyze experimental data in the physical sciences. The programming examples are somewhat dated, however.
Phillipe Grosjean. SciViews. 2005.
SciViews contains information on software for data analysis and acquisition in science, focusing especially on free, open-source software. The site’s links page is also especially helpful.
Stefan Steinhaus. The Scientific Web. 2006.
This site provides a wealth of information on scientific computer software, including product descriptions, demo versions, links to user groups, and tips and tricks for working with various applications. A broad range of fields are covered, including the natural sciences, medicine, psychology, and finance.
(see also many of the references in the “Simluation” section above)
LaTeX—A document preparation system. The LaTeX project, 2006.
Frank Mittelbach and Michel Goossens. The LaTeX Companion, second ed. Boston, MA: Addision-Wesley, 2004. 1120pp.
LaTeX (pronounced LAY-tech or LAH-tech) is a document preparation and typesetting tool that is heavily used in mathematics, the physical sciences, and engineering. The use of symbols and mathematics in the sciences requires special attention to typesetting, and LaTeX allows you to faithfully display equations, chemical formulas, graphs and charts, and many other features that are difficult to do well in traditional word processing tools. The official LaTeX site provides links to free downloads of LaTeX software and documentation to get you started, and The LaTeX Companion is considered the bible of the LaTeX system by many users.
Janet S. Dodd, ed. The ACS Style Guide, second ed. Washington, DC: The American Chemical Society, 1997. 472pp.
Anne Waldron, Peggy Judd, and Valerie Miller. Physical Review Style and Notation Guide, revised ed. College Park, MD: The American Physical Society, 2005.
AIP Style Manual, fourth ed. Woodbury, NY: American Institute of Physics, 1997.
These three publications are style guides from national organizations in the physical sciences—the American Chemical Society, American Physical Society, and the American Institute of Physics, respectively. Each covers writing, bibliographic citation, and manuscript preparation, and each differs slightly from the others, so you should check the exact requirements of your professor or the editors of the journal to which you are submitting a paper. The ACS Style Guide is available only in print, while the APS and AIP guides are available online.