You Wouldn't Find Anywhere Else On Earth Time has not been sparing of art. It erases more surely than the wind.
Art conservation is the attempt to reassemble the shards of history, to undo time.
And materials scientists, more often than not, are the detectives who trace out this elaborate history. Jennifer Mass, who earned her chemistry doctorate at Cornell in 1995, has just the curious and fortuitous intellectual history these abstruse matters demand. With sophisticated tools of the profession such as powder X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy at her disposal, Jennifer's first career stop is the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Sherman Fairchild Center for Objects Conservation, Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. The project employed neutron activation analysis and electron spin resonance, techniques well suited to detect minor and trace elements in silicates. Samples bombarded with neutrons form unstable radioactive isotopes that emit gamma rays as they decompose to a more stable product.