Science Quote by Johannes Stark

Stark’s sentence has the blunt, procedural feel of a lab notebook trying to become a law of nature. It marches you along “a series of lines” and “serial numbers” as if the spectrum were an orderly bureaucracy, then lands the punchline: shorter wavelength, bigger electric-field effect. The point isn’t poetry; it’s control. He’s naming a dependable trend that lets physicists predict how matter behaves when you crank up an external field.

The context is the early-20th-century scramble to understand atoms by the way they emit and absorb light. Stark is circling what would be formalized as the Stark effect: spectral lines shifting and splitting under an electric field. His emphasis on ordering (“serial numbers increase”) reflects a period when quantum theory was still hardening from a set of puzzling regularities into a framework. Before you can explain, you tabulate. Before you can model, you rank.

The subtext is methodological confidence: nature’s messiness can be domesticated into monotonic relationships. “Greater as... wavelength decreases” reads like a bridge between observation and theory, hinting that higher-energy transitions (shorter wavelengths) are more susceptible to perturbation. It also signals a new kind of physics where the environment matters; atoms aren’t isolated Platonic objects, they’re systems you can push around with fields and read out via spectroscopy.

Even the clunky phrasing is revealing: the authority comes from measurement and sequence, not rhetorical flourish. Stark is selling reliability, the kind that turns a curious spectral wiggle into a tool for probing atomic structure.