giants for science
January 5, 2006 2:00 PM   Subscribe

Here are the the ten most beautiful science experiments.
posted by The Jesse Helms (40 comments total)
 
A bit biased towards physics, with no mention of fundamental biological discoveries at all.
posted by Rothko at 2:06 PM on January 5, 2006


Biology is squishy. Rothko has a point though.
posted by bardic at 2:08 PM on January 5, 2006


And Millikan cooked his numbers. From the link: "He published the results of measurements on just 58 drops, whereas the notebooks reveal that he studied some 175 drops... And to make matters worse, he lied about it."

Probably the most famous fraud ever. Of course, fraud is OK when you end up being right. And you're beautiful. Or something.
posted by GuyZero at 2:15 PM on January 5, 2006


Also, the Tower of Pisa experiement is generally not held to be true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallileo
posted by ducksauce at 2:30 PM on January 5, 2006


What about this one?
posted by brain_drain at 2:31 PM on January 5, 2006


Crease wrote this about the same subject - this may have been mentioned in the times article, but it's archive and I don't want to pay $$.
posted by lalochezia at 2:32 PM on January 5, 2006


"Based on the paper of George Johnson in The New York Times", which was, incidentally, published September 24, 2002.
posted by Plutor at 2:34 PM on January 5, 2006


What about that guy who first measured the speed of light? I'd put that ahead of the dorky Rutherford nucleus thing.
posted by alms at 2:39 PM on January 5, 2006


brain_drain totally beat me.
curses.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 2:39 PM on January 5, 2006


10 Most Famous Physics Experiments.
posted by rxrfrx at 2:40 PM on January 5, 2006


Life involves a lots of experiments and calculated risks, just like in a laboratory!
posted by Leam Srehtorb at 2:41 PM on January 5, 2006


Thanks for the link, TJH. I've been in on enough minor/trivial discoveries to relish the thought of having the experience of finding something really huge. As I read through these, I wondered how many of them knew they had just found something fundamental to science.
posted by forrest at 2:47 PM on January 5, 2006


Interesting. I didn't realize the Earth's circumference was measured in 276BC ! Blows away the whole notion that people thought the world was flat... well turns out some people did think the world was flat but not everyone.
posted by StarForce5 at 2:48 PM on January 5, 2006


I vote for Parity Violation although the Cavendish experiment would be my top choice among those listed.
posted by vacapinta at 2:55 PM on January 5, 2006


Yep, clearly this ought to be called the ten most beatiful physics experiments: "...recently asked physicists to nominate the most beautiful experiment of all time."

Any list of the ten most beautiful science experiments would have to include the elegant Meselson-Stahl experiment. Simple enough that you don't have to be a biologist to understand it, and published less than 50 years ago--how many other experiments are there from the last 50 years which demonstrate something previously unknown, and are this simple and elegant?
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 2:58 PM on January 5, 2006


I'd argue for the Michelson-Morley experiement, though that was more elegant than beautiful.

Also, biology is for suckers.
posted by Eideteker at 2:59 PM on January 5, 2006


The kind of suckers on a squid's tentacles, sure. Biology is all about those.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 3:08 PM on January 5, 2006


Those are good experiments and are basic and reproducible enough to share will kids. I like 'em.
posted by snsranch at 3:09 PM on January 5, 2006


Biology only deals with an arbitrary and specific set of physical interactions, namely those commonly seen in self-propagating patterns of matter we known of here on earth. So while it's useful, it's can never approach the universal and general elegance of physics.
posted by phrontist at 3:09 PM on January 5, 2006


Actualy, heavier objects do fall faster then light ones, even in a vaccum. The diffrence is too hard to detect though, it's because heavy objects also attract the earth to them.

And of course denser objects fall faster then less dense ones.
posted by delmoi at 3:12 PM on January 5, 2006


Oh, come on, what about the elegance of Paine's keystone species experiments? Now that was elegant, and provided a central bit of dogma in terms of how we look at the natural world. And what could be more elegant than shot-putting sea stars?
posted by redbeard at 3:15 PM on January 5, 2006


Biology only deals with an arbitrary and specific set of physical interactions, namely those commonly seen in self-propagating patterns of matter we known of here on earth. So while it's useful, it's can never approach the universal and general elegance of physics.

An aesthetic judgement not shared by all. Harumpf.
posted by Rothko at 3:20 PM on January 5, 2006


Funny, the first thing I thought of upon seeing "top ten experiments of all time" was Millikan's oil-drop experiment. It's a beautiful experiment, but you do have to be selective with the drops you measure due to the randomness of the size... "cook the numbers" as some naysayers might put it. It's easily my #1 pick.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 3:38 PM on January 5, 2006


Electron diffraction is definitely one of the coolest ones, because it can be shown that diffraction can take place even if there's only one electron in flight at a time.

So if there's only one electron moving through the system, which of the two slits does the electron pass through, and what is it interfering with? The answer from quantum mechanics is straightforward and wonderful: it passes through both slits and interferes with itself, because it's acting like a wave and not like a particle. The wave function doesn't collapse until the electron reaches the target. Marvelous!

Feynman once said, "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."

[By the way, I agree that the Michelson-Morley experiment should have been on the list. I consider it more important and more elegant than Focault's Pedulum, at the very least.]
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 4:03 PM on January 5, 2006


I agree with the electron diffraction experiment being cool. It's a great example of how the physical world on a small scale is so unlike the world we can sense for ourselves. Which is what quantum mechanics is all about.
posted by tommasz at 4:08 PM on January 5, 2006


Starforce5, the tradition that says people in the middle ages thought the earth was flat is bunk. That's particularly true regarding the Columbus legend.

Everyone then knew the earth was round; the evidence for that was overwhelming. The argument was about how large the earth was. There were two numbers going around at the time, and Columbus believed the smaller one. The King of Portugal believed the larger one. If Columbus had been right, it would have been possible to sail from Portugal to Japan with conventional ships of the day. If the King of Portugal was right, they'd all die of starvation long before getting there.

The reason this is interesting is that the larger number which the King of Portugal believed was Aratosthenes' number, and it was approximately right. If there had been no American continent for Columbus to bump into, he and his men would indeed have all died.

I have a nominee for another experiment which was very important and very little known: the first inorganic synthesis of urea.

At the time it was thought that there was a qualitative difference between "organic" compounds and "inorganic" compounds, because "organic" compounds were an aspect of life. But in 1828, a chemist named Wöhler figured out how to synthesize urea from inorganic precursors and was able to show that his urea was exactly the same as urea from organic sources.

That erased the boundary between "life" and "unlife". Scientifically, perhaps, it wasn't all that big a deal. Philosophically it was an earthquake.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 4:11 PM on January 5, 2006


What about the Pitch Drop experiment? Maybe it's beautiful only to material scientists and mechanical engineers.
posted by Araucaria at 4:25 PM on January 5, 2006


Anyone else notice that the Foucault's Pendulum is sketching an off-color Yellow Sign?
posted by aeschenkarnos at 4:54 PM on January 5, 2006


Elder sign
posted by Tenuki at 5:07 PM on January 5, 2006


Pish.

Every teenage boy who gets his first microscope knows what the most beautiful experiment is.

Self-love and science combined. What could be sweeter?
posted by PeterMcDermott at 5:40 PM on January 5, 2006


I read the list and wondered about Michelson-Morley right off the bat, too. Why, I wonder, was it not included? The fact that it did nor render the expected result and confirm the existence of the ether?

Don't the best experiments do exactly that?
posted by VMC at 11:29 PM on January 5, 2006


Actualy, heavier objects do fall faster then light ones, even in a vaccum. The diffrence is too hard to detect though, it's because heavy objects also attract the earth to them.

Not sure what you mean. In a constant gravitational field, all objects fall at exactly the same rate, regardless of their mass (or density).
posted by snoktruix at 8:54 AM on January 6, 2006


And this is true in general relativity too. In fact, it's a cornerstone of GR, called the equivalence principle.
posted by snoktruix at 8:55 AM on January 6, 2006


Interesting site, although I agree with the criticisms above. I thought it interesting that Galileo was mentioned twice; once for the Tower of Pisa experiment that he did not really perform, and once for the rolling balls experiment that was actually how he researched falling bodies. It is my understanding that he never dropped anything as part of an experiment as the timing devices of the day were too primitive for the speeds of falling object; instead he used balls rolling down an incline as an experimental model, an insight that is often ignored.

The criticism that Millikan cherry-picked his data is in large part refuted by the reprodiciblilty of the experiment; one of the strengths of the scientific method

The Pitch Drop experiment is cool; I had never heard of it. I expect an episode of Nova devoted to it any day now!
posted by TedW at 12:11 PM on January 6, 2006


Steven C. Den Beste writes "I have a nominee for another experiment which was very important and very little known: the first inorganic synthesis of urea."

Yes! I completely agree!
posted by mr_roboto at 1:13 PM on January 6, 2006


Don't get me wrong, my beef with Millikan is not that it's not a good experiment, it is, but that almost every description glosses over the fact that it's a very hard experiment to execute. People make it sound like Milliken got the bright idea of floating a few drops of charged oil and, voila, he knew the charge on an electron. It's so hard that a very smart man, running a very good experiment, still felt compelled to lie about his results.
posted by GuyZero at 1:36 PM on January 6, 2006


How about Alamogordo, July 16th 1945. First man-made nuclear explosion.

That's an experiment of sorts. Beautiful in a terrible way.
posted by storybored at 2:46 PM on January 6, 2006


Snoktruix, the earth move further towards a heavier object that's falling than a light one, so the collision takes place sooner.

Of course, when you're talking about comparing a one kilo cannon ball to a ten kilo cannon ball, the difference is measured in femtoseconds because the Earth moves a distance smaller than the diameter of a proton, but still...

Storybored: Alamogordo was an achievement of engineering, not of science.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 9:04 PM on January 6, 2006


Steven C. Den Beste writes "Snoktruix, the earth move further towards a heavier object that's falling than a light one, so the collision takes place sooner."

But both objects fall at the same rate, the heavier one just impacts the target earlier.
posted by Mitheral at 7:09 AM on January 9, 2006


Mitheral: relative to what? If a person is using the Earth as their frame of reference, then the heavier object will be measured as falling (very slightly) faster.

If you're not using the Earth as your frame of reference, what are you using?
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 11:18 AM on January 9, 2006


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