Science Quote by Johannes Stark

You can hear the ambition straining against the modesty of the phrasing. Stark calls it a "particular task", but he’s really staking a claim on one of early 20th-century physics’ most coveted prizes: turning spectroscopy from a catalog of colored lines into a microscope for the atom itself. The key rhetorical move is the word "connexion" - not description, not correlation, but an engineered bridge. He’s announcing a program: if the atom’s internal structure changes, its light must change too, and the lab can force the issue.

The insistence on "experimental investigation" matters. This is the era when atomic theory was rapidly professionalizing, and prestige attached to those who could make invisible structure legible through reproducible effects. Stark is positioning himself as an empiricist with a long horizon ("for some twenty years"), signaling patience, authority, and a kind of proprietary relationship to the problem. He’s not dabbling; he’s building a career-long apparatus, both literal and reputational.

Context sharpens the intent. Stark is best known for the Stark effect - the splitting of spectral lines in an electric field - which became a powerful proof that spectra respond to external conditions in systematic ways. The subtext is competitive: physics at the time was crowded with rival frameworks (classical models buckling, quantum ideas emerging). By foregrounding controlled structural change and measurable spectral response, Stark is arguing that the atom can be interrogated, not merely theorized. That’s how you win a paradigm shift: by making nature answer on demand.