EMPIRICAL MEASUREMENT: Molecules and Atoms. Late Encounter with Günter Wagner: The ‘man-in-the-middle’

eJournal: uffmm.org
ISSN 2567-6458, 27.December 2022 – 29.December 2022
Email: info@uffmm.org
Author: Gerd Doeben-Henisch
Email: gerd@doeben-henisch.de

CONTEXT

This post is part of the uffmm.org blog and has no direct predecessor, but the subject is thematically related to the larger topic of ’empirical theory’.

CONTENT

This text is devoted to Günter Wagner, who paved the way for many achievements in Research, Technology and Industry, and thereby for Society too. Born in 1934 his life is interwoven with many important events in history and his personal knowledge about these events is striking. The center of his experience and knowledge is mass spectrometry and the more specialized perspective of gas chromatography-mass spectrometry [1,2]. Günter Wagner is dealing with this topic from many sides: theoretical foundations, technological realizations, and different applications in industry, accompanied with many new improvements in the applied technologies.

The author of this text is a ‘layman’ in the field of mass spectrometry. His experience is centered around the topic of Philosophy of science, Cognitive Sciences as well as Computer Science. Besides the many interesting points in the knowledge and work of Günter Wagner the author of this text is focusing on the ‘role’ of mass spectrometry in the ‘measurement’ of real world objects and properties as starting point for possible theories.

With this setting the encounter with Günter Wagner can be understood as an ‘experiment in trans-disciplinary understanding’ of one field — mass spectrometry — from the point of another field — Philosophy of Science. Such an approach is not a simple undertaking. It needed about 30 years of personal knowledge of each other for this idea to take shape. What will be the outcome is at the time of this writing ‘open’.

  1. The ‘Man-in-the-Middle’ (Last Change: 29.December 2022) What measurement means to theory-building by using mass spectroscopy.

COMMENTS

wkp := wikipedia

[1] Mass Spectrometry in wkp [EN] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_spectrometry (Last access: 28.Dec 2022)

[2] Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry in wkp [EN] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_chromatography%E2%80%93mass_spectrometry (Last access: 28.Dec 2022)