Investigation and interpretation in insulators: a primer for the unwary

Takes stock of what appears in the literature about dielectric materials and insulators. This article draws attention to the real state of affairs that is often encountered: what we measure, what we think we know, and what in fact can be deduced about dielectrics may not be quite the same thing. This distinction is often obscured, not infrequently is not mentioned, and sometimes is not even recognized by the authors of learned papers. While specialists in some particular area will be able to interpret correctly the work that gets published in their field, the larger technical audience may be not well versed in the assumptions being incorporated and may well be unaware of some of the nuances. Under these circumstances, it is very easy to accept uncritically what is being said and quite easy to be misled on occasion. In a somewhat arbitrary order, the article gives below a discussion of the situation as seen in a number of different types of investigation, starting from the most applied and working towards the more fundamental studies.<>