Mass spectrometers are much simpler than they look—or sound. Suppose someone gives you a bucketful of atoms of different chemical elements and asks you what's inside. You need to separate out the atoms quickly and efficiently, but how do you do it? Simple! Tip your bucket into a mass spectrometer. It turns the atoms into ions (electrically charged atoms with either too few or too many electrons). Then it separates the ions by passing them first through an electric field, then through a magnetic field, so they fan out into a spectrum. A computerized detector tallies the ions in different parts of the spectrum and you can use this information to figure out what kinds of atoms were originally in your bucket. That's the basic idea.
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