| dc.description.abstract | When non-mass spectrometrists are talking about mass spectrometry, it rather often
sounds as if they were telling a story out of Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination.
Indeed, mass spectrometry appears to be regarded as a mysterious method, just
good enough to supply some molecular weight information. Unfortunately, this
rumor about the dark side of analytical methods may reach students way before
their first contact with mass spectrometry. Possibly, some of this may have been
bred by some mass spectrometrists who used to celebrate each mass spectrum they
obtained from the very first gigantic machines of the early days. Of course, there
were also those who enthusiastically started in the 1950s toward developing mass
spectrometry out of the domain of physics to become a new analytical tool for
chemistry. Within the more than a hundred years since J. J. Thomson’s seminal
work, there has been a lot that has happened and a lot now to be known and learned
about mass spectrometry. | en_US |
