The toughest job a highbrow machinist can tackle is to make a diffraction grating. The end result does not look like much: just a piece of glass coated with a film of aluminum in which thousands of microscopic lines are ruled. But when light hits such a grating, it separates into a brilliant spectrum that is far more useful for most scientific purposes than the spectrum formed by prisms. The closer the lines, the more the spectrum tells about the light that hits it, so scientists are always demanding finer & finer gratings from the machinists.
Last week the Bausch & Lomb...
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