Born in Unna, Specht attended the Gymnasium in Kamen and studied physics from 1956 until 1962 at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, the Technical University of Munich and the ETH Zurich.
As a postdoc he had a NRC Fellowship at the AECL Nuclear Physics Laboratories in Chalk River in Canada.
[4] Here he initiated the tumor therapy with heavy ions and patient treatments on the grounds of the laboratory itself, in collaboration with the Radiology Clinic of the University and the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg.
[6] His central research areas were atomic physics (quasi-molecules in low-energy heavy-ion collisions),[7] nuclear fission (shape isomers and fission induced by heavy ions), and quark-gluon plasma formation in high-energy heavy-ion collisions at CERN.,[8][9] In each 1983/84, 1990/91 and 2003/2004 he spent a sabbatical year at CERN.
[10] He also worked together with Hans Guenter Dosch and others on the physics and neurophysiology of the early processing of central musical quantities in the brain,[11][12] like tone pitch and tone spectrum (he played piano since childhood).