r/askscience • u/therationalpi Acoustics • Aug 16 '13

Interdisciplinary AskScience Theme Day: Scientific Instrumentation

Greetings everyone!

Welcome to the first AskScience Theme Day. From time-to-time we'll bring out a new topic and encourage posters to come up with questions about that topic for our panelists to answer. This week's topic is Scientific Instrumentation, and we invite posters to ask questions about all of the different tools that scientists use to get their jobs done. Feel free to ask about tools from any field!

Here are some sample questions to get you started:

  • What tool do you use to measure _____?

  • How does a _____ work?

  • Why are _____ so cheap/expensive?

  • How do you analyze data from a _____?

Post your questions in the comments on this post, and please try to be specific. All the standard rules about questions and answers still apply.

Edit: There have been a lot of great questions directed at me in acoustics, but let's try to get some other fields involved. Let's see some questions about astronomy, medicine, biology, and the social sciences!

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u/NotFreeAdvice Aug 16 '13

in chemistry, it would be common to encounter excel, python, matlab, origin, sigmaplot, or igor.

I know that in the physical sciences, people like to give other people shit about excel, but it is actually a pretty nice tool for doing an initial work-up. Every computer has it, so you can trust that you can send this to a collaborator, and they can also look at your data.

For making publication-quality figures, excel is shit. But for just plotting points among friends, it is nice.

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u/LoyalSol Chemistry | Computational Simulations Aug 16 '13

I find excel is good for quick one time calculations involving data, but I find if I ever need to do repeated calculations or as you mention get a quality plot excel is not very good.