Scientific disciplines

Vibrational spectroscopy is an enomiously large subject area spamiing many scientific disciplines. The methodology, both experimental and theoretical, was developed primarily by physical chemists and has branched far and wide over the last 50 years. This chapter will mainly focus on its importance with regard to physical chemistry. 

Chemistry, like any scientific discipline, relies heavily on experimental observations, and therefore on data. Until a few years ago, the usual way to publish information on recent scientific developments was to release it in books or journals. In chemistry, the enormous increase in the number of compounds and the data concerning them resulted in increasingly ineffective data-handling, on the side of the producers as well as the users. One way out of this disaster is the electronic processing, by computer methods, of this huge amount of data available in chemistry. Compared with other scientific disciplines that only use text and numbers for data transfer, chemistry has an additional, special challenge molecules. The molecular species consist of atoms and bonds that hold them together. Moreover, compounds... 

The visualization of volumetric properties is more important in other scientific disciplines (e.g., computer tomography in medicine, or convection streams in geology). However, there are also some applications in chemistry (Figure 2-125d), among which only the distribution of water density in molecular dynamics simulations will be mentioned here. Computer visualization of this property is usually realized with two or three dimensional textures [203]. 

Some of the concepts that chemists have introduced for the discussion of chemical reactivity are summarized below. Much of this will be common knowledge to readers that have studied chemistry they can easily skip this section. However, for readers from other scientific disciplines or whose chemical knowledge has become rusty, some fundamental concepts are presented here. 

Fusion energy research is also the primary avenue for the development of plasma physics as a scientific discipline. The technologies and the science of plasmas developed en route to fusion power are already important in other appHcations and fields of science (see Plasma technology). 

Microscopy is an unusual scientific discipline, involving as it does a wide variety of microscopes and techniques. All have in common the abiUty to image and enlarge tiny objects to macroscopic size for study, comparison, evaluation, and identification. Few industries or research laboratories can afford to ignore microscopy, although each may use only a small fraction of the various types. Microscopy review articles appear every two years m. Jinalytical Chemistty (1,2). Whereas the style of the Enclyclopedia employs lower case abbreviations for analytical techniques and instmments, eg, sem for scanning electron microscope, in this article capital letters will be used, eg, SEM. 

This entire book is about the emergence, nature and cultivation of a new discipline, materials science and engineering. To draw together the strings of this story, it helps to be clear about what a scientific discipline actually is that, in turn, becomes clearer if one looks at the emergence of some earlier disciplines which have had more time to reach a condition of maturity. Comparisons can help in definition we can narrow a vague concept by examining what apparently diverse examples have in common. 

One other set of issues runs through the book like a leitmotif What is a scientific discipline How do di.sciplines emerge and differentiate Can a discipline also be Interdisciplinary Is materials science a real discipline These questions are not just an exercise in lexicography and, looking back, it is perhaps the last of these questions which gave me the impetus to embark on the book. 

Another measure of the importance of a scientific discipline is its contributions to technology. In this arena, the study of particle adhesion has a long list of accomplishments and is expected to continue to add value in a variety of industries. 

The American Biological Safety Association promotes biosafety as a scientific discipline and senses the growing needs of biosafety professionals throughout the world. It is a professional association that represents the interests and needs of practitioners of biological safety, and provides a fomm for the continued and timely exchange of biosafety information. 

Every scientific discipline has its characteristic set of problems and systematic methods for obtaining their solution— that is, its paradigm. Chemical engineering is no exception. Since its birth in the last centmy, its fundamental intellectual model has undergone a series of dramatic changes. 

Following upon the success of the ACOL series, which by its very name is predominately concerned with Analytical Chemistry, the Analytical Techniques in the Sciences (AnTs) series of open learning texts has now been introduced with the aim of providing a broader coverage of the many areas of science in which analytical techniques and methods are now increasingly applied. With this in mind, the AnTs series of texts seeks to provide a range of books which will cover not only the actual techniques themselves, but also those scientific disciplines which have a necessary requirement for analytical characterization methods. 

The use of stress terminology has been discussed in Chapter 1, where it was pointed out that the value of the term stress in indicating some adverse force or influence lies in its extreme generality, without the need for a precise quantification. Nevertheless it is appropriate that a scientific discipline should be concerned with definable quantities. This will be the starting point for this paper, which will follow the example of Levitt (1972) who applied the concepts and terminology of mechanical stress (force per unit area) and strain (a definable dimension change) to the study of plant responses to the environment. This approach will be developed here in an attempt to incorporate the philosophies behind stress effects into a general treatment of the responses of ecosystems to adverse environmental conditions. 

Smaller companies tend to have fewer concerns around, for example, system scalability, global WAN performance, and complex systems integration. They are rather more driven by the pure functionality of the ELN that is addressing the specific scientific disciplines of interest. Key drivers in this sector of the market have been medicinal chemistry departments, where the obvious benefits of searching existing reactions by substructure and reaction transformations, the ability to automate stoichiometry calculations, the ability to load spectral information, etc. have made for easy adoption and clear and realizable benefits. 

The 1980s saw many important developments in the scientific disciplines that underpin the use of protein crystallography in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. Molecular biology and protein chemistry methods... 

Catalysis is a very broad field of study that is closely intenvoven ivith numerous other scientific disciplines. This becomes immediately evident if we realize that catalysis as phenomenon encompasses many length scales. Fig. 1.8 illustrates this for the case of heterogeneous catalysis. 

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