The following is the first sentence of a journal article from 1980. Am I the only one who finds this hilarious?
Was this article written by a certain Tom Swift, Jnr? 
Okay, color me unusually dense and/or caffeine-deficient**, but I just don’t get either the OP or Kymodoce’s answer???
**soon to be remedied!
I find it hard to imagine describing a UV Spectrometer or a Polarimeter (!!) as having “awesome power”.
Scientist #1: Hey, listen to me revvin’ up this Cary 14!
Scientist #2: Wow, that’s bithin’!
Scientist #1: And I haven;t even got to the vacuum UV yet! Wait’ll you hear my polarimeter!
Wouldn’t they be passive devices?
Next the awesome power of the thermometer.
Ah well, people not getting me is not exactly unusual… 
The eponymous Tom Swift was a character in a series of sci-fi books by Victor Appleton II, written in the '50’s I believe. They had titles like “Tom Swift and the Repelatron Skyway”, and “TS and the Polar-Ray Dynasphere”. To a non-physicist ( I hope I picked the right discipline) like me, the OP’s article sounded rather like one of those made-up titles. Believe me, Tom Swifts inventions really DID have awesome power…
Nitpick: The original Tom Swift was the hero of a series of kiddie “scientific adventures (“Edisonades”) 'way back in the 1920s or thereabouts. All novels appeared under the “house name” of Victor Appleton”, regardless of who actually wrote them. My hometown library had a bunch of these, with titles like “Tom Swift and his Electric Motorbike”.
In the late 1950s (I thinkl) they revived the line, only now it was Tom Swift, jr., and the stories were ostensibly written by Victor Appleton III. And instead of lame inventions like Electric Motorbikes, Tom had things like nuclear subs.
But he never had an Awesome UV Spectrophomtometer and Polarimeter.
An Ultraviolet Spectrometer?
Rather than an ultraviolet spectrophotometer??
Well, if the bloody thing had no light source in it, I might just have to be a little bit awed.
Arrrrgh, out Tom-Swifted! Still, I bet you never tried to make a Megascope Space Prober out of sticky-back plastic and a detergent bottle, did ya?
Actually it doesn’t - it’s an astronomical instrument. The article is from Solar Physics, and the UVSP (UV Spectrometer and Polarimeter) is one of the instruments on the Solar Maximum satellite. (Which has the dubious discinction of being the first satellite to be repaird in space.)
What’s the difference between a spectrometer and a spectrophotometer? I haven’t seen the latter term used in astronomy.
“Ooh, I LOVE powerful sciencey stuff!” Tom ejaculated.
Hrmm…did I get the format wrong? :smack:
“How does an Ultraviolet Spectrometer work without a light source?” Tom said darkly.
For be it from me to derail a good hijack, but I want to be the first to say to the OP, “Cite?”
Well, I don’t think they should be so proud of this technological terror they have constructed. Its awesomeness is insignificant next to the power of the Force.
When the Taser electric immobilization weapon first came on the market, it was reported that it was named for an old Tom Swift book.
Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle
TASER, with the A dropped in to make it pronouncable.
Solar Physics, vol. 65, Feb. 1980, p. 73-90
You can read it for yourself, I think.
The last portion of the first paragraph is also a gem:
I build things like spectrometers and polarimeters for a living, and I’ve written dozens, reviewed hundreds, and listened to thousands of SPIE technical papers, and language like this is uncommon, but not rare.
It’s typical of university students, or industry whiz-kids fresh out of university. There are a lot of young turks think they can break the fuddy-duddy square mold of engineers, but they generally abandon that when they finally realize the awesome power of cultural inertia.
Oh and as to the question of why spectrometer and not spectrophotometer, a spectrometer has only a spectral absolute accuracy requirement, while a spectrophotometer has both a spectrometric and photometric absolute accuracy specification.
In other words, the former just measures the color, while the latter measures color and intensity.
Just wait until I publish my article about my “Fucking Awesome Strain of E. coli”. I did the research with my “Incredibly Damn Nifty Pipetters”.
As odd as that is in a scientific paper, it would probably be even odder elsewhere.