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The Most Beautiful Experiments in Physics
TheMatt writes "In this month's 'Physics World', Robert P. Crease asks the question: what is
the most beautiful experiment in physics?
Some criteria quoted are that it must change what people thought, must not be too complicated or expensive, and, most importantly, be within the reach of students (which leaves out Stern-Gerlach or Michelson-Morley). He also has a page at BNL reprinting the article, with a
place for suggestions from the community on their opinion." I'll nominate a simple one: Foucault's Pendulum. :)
What about Gallileo's hypothesis about the Feather and the Hammer that was proven on the (IIRC) Apollo 14 mission?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
My vote (without reading other comments) goes to Arthur Eddington's validation of Einstein's relativity by demonstrating that the sun's gravity bent the light from nearby stars. But how do you see stars when they're right next to the sun? Good lateral thinking, very ingenious...
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
But this experiment is a bit misleading. Mass isn't actually independent of gravity. It is just extremely negligable when the second object is billions of times more massive than the object in question (like a bowling ball as compared to the Earth).
The force of gravity is proportional to the sums of the masses of the two objects in question (m1 + m2), and the Earth (m2) has a mass of 5.9736 × 10^24 kg. Try the same experiment by comparing how fast a bowling ball falls in comparison to a bowling-ball sized neutron star. (Of course, you wouldn't want to drop them at the same time, because you'd then be dealing with a three-body problem.)
Eratosthenes accurately estimated the diameter and circumference of the earth with a stick. That's beauty.
Quite right. This beautiful experiment is explained and recreated in Carl Sagan's Cosmos series. Not only that, but Eratosthenes did this many years Before Christ. By the time that Christopher Columbus petitioned the royal court for funding for three ships to sail westward from Portugal to India, scientists already knew the circumference of the earth pretty damn well. Well enough to know there was no way in hell Columbus would ever make it. But in 1492 -- and this is still true today, unfortunately -- the intelligent advice of scientists was disregarded by the rulers were blinded by visions of wealth and power and the Queen funded Columbus' journey. Turns out, unbeknownst to anyone, that Columbus' ass was saved because there was a land mass closer than halfway. Columbus decided that since he had sailed west to get to India, and ran into some land, had indeed reached India and proclaimed the inhabitants Indians -- a misnomer which exists to this day.
Although Eratosthenes was a true genius the world hails Christopher Columbus as a hero even though his accomplishment was sheer accident. What does this tell you about how the world views science and scientists?
GMD
watch this
it is an amorphous solid, refer to this urban legend...
An Urban Legend
The legend usually appears in any of the following forms:
Antique windowpanes are thicker at the bottom, because glass has flowed to the bottom over time.
Glass has no crystalline structure, hence it is NOT a solid.
Glass is a supercooled liquid.
Glass is a liquid that flows very slowly.
Glass is a liquid.
The prolonged survival of this legend, chiefly among English speakers (and particularly among North Americans) is puzzling -- especially when one considers that glass and glassy materials are readily available, and one can easily verify if one can pour a gallon of glass, or drain a pint of obsidian.
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