Scientific
In science, lasers are used in many ways, including:
- A wide variety of interferometric techniques
- Raman spectroscopy
- Laser induced breakdown spectroscopy
- Atmospheric remote sensing
- Investigating nonlinear optics phenomena
- Holographic techniques employing lasers also contribute to a number of measurement techniques.
- Laser based LIght Detection And Ranging (LIDAR) technology has application in geology, seismology, remote sensing and atmospheric physics.
- Lasers have been used aboard spacecraft such as in the Cassini-Huygens mission.
- In astronomy, lasers have been used to create artificial laser guide stars, used as reference objects for adaptive optics telescopes.
Lasers may also be indirectly used in spectroscopy as a micro-sampling system, a technique termed Laser ablation (LA), which is typically applied to ICP-MS apparatus resulting in the powerful LA-ICP-MS.
The principles of laser spectroscopy are discussed by Demtröder and the use of tunable lasers in spectroscopy are described in Tunable Laser Applications. ).
Read more about this topic: Laser Applications
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—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
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—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“To develop an empiricist account of science is to depict it as involving a search for truth only about the empirical world, about what is actual and observable.... It must involve throughout a resolute rejection of the demand for an explanation of the regularities in the observable course of nature, by means of truths concerning a reality beyond what is actual and observable, as a demand which plays no role in the scientific enterprise.”
—Bas Van Fraassen (b. 1941)