19 Technical supplies, equipment, and services

A large fraction of objects and services produced in a complex society are not intended for personal use by people but instead as means-to-an-end for business, industry, and government. Indeed, “business-to-business” expositions and directories facilitate this major area of commerce. Products range from office supplies & equipment to heavy machinery, while services might include laboratory analysis and aerial photography. The adroit use of these products and services falls within the realm of technical competencies; here we are concerned more with the human effort and organizations provide these resources and how physics can aid this large area of human activity. Indeed, Fortune-500 companies like General Electric, IBM, 3M, provide a broad range of products for commercial use, while thousands of niche businesses fill very specific needs through the capabilities of highly-trained technical staff. As one example, consider the production of high-temperature superconducting wire: who provides this and how does their business work across the whole spectrum of production, technical sales, and distribution?

One need only look over a comprehensive list of technical competency domains – ranging from safety equipment to measurement devices & services to materials handling equipment to production machinery to optical technologies to facilities for harsh environments – to realize that the scope of activity and the potential for employment of physicists is quite broad. Perhaps some challenging questions for inventive physicists might be: are there new physical applications that cross a wide spectrum of business and industrial needs? (Electrical energy, computer and communications technologies certainly grew into vast enterprises for this purpose.) In contrast, is there an important niche where a narrowly-focused business – say tree cutting along roadways and near homes – can be reconceptualized to include some new way of using physics? In between, are there common retail business operations like food distribution or home maintenance supply that rely on key services and products to function competitively, such as processes and equipment to monitor inventory and stock shelving? Or finally, starting with a particular domain of physics – say particle physics – what applications to commerce can be found - such as neutron activation analysis used for product or container inspection?