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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. :)
Henry Cavendish did an experiment to measure the gravitational constant G. He used a torsional pendulum with two small lead weights to measure the gravitational attraction of two large lead weights nearby. I did this experiment as an undergrad and got a pretty good value for G (big error bars though). It's amazing that back in the 1700s he could measure the gravitational force due to a lead ball.
I just did a google search on "Cavendish experiment" and found this. Evidently a geologist named John Michell deserves some credit too.
Uh, what's the target group? I teach general freshman physics at my university and discuss both SG and MM experiments in detail.
Anyway, I nominate the first nuclear explosion as the greatest ever experiment. Until a hole is successfully opened in the spacetime, splitting the atom is the greatest scientific achievement ever.
There is, in fact, a fabulous book on this subject. What makes it such a great book is that it doesn't depict the making of the atomic so much as a rigorous scientific project, but rather as a social, political, random and very much a human achievement.
The owls are not what they seem
...has to be a front-runner here. Something as simple as a piece of paper and a light source showed that classical mechanics was not enough to explain our universe and that quantum mechanics had to be invented. No computers needed, no complex aparratus, and no genius needed to explain it (today).
;-)
Course, I am a physics freak. The biology, computer science, chemistry, etc. freaks may have their own opinions!
Yea, but just try to get the student to hold still long enough to do the experament while inside of one. Lazy students, allways banging on the side of the jar trying to get oiut rather then just getting down to learning.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
If you mean clear glass thicker at the bottom than the top, sometimes found in old English buildings, the Glass Flow page page at the Urban Legends page someone posted earlier says this is also an artifact of the way early clear glass panes were made. The slabs are uneven, and the builders install them with the thickest portion at the bottom to avoid unbalancing the panes.
If you still think glass is a liquid, tell me why Cartaginian glass, made thousands of years ago, are not puddles, and why obsidian shards milions of years old still have sharp edges.
John Conway's Game of Life, the most well-known cellular automaton, shows how nonlocal phenomena can be generated from purely local rules.
Since exposed to the science minded through Martin Gardner's column in Scientific American in 1970, Life has introduced many to the study of complex systems, emergence, etc, etc, which I now see as providing a broader context for the physics (and chemistry and biology and collaborative systems) which we find in this world.
For the record, this does not mean that I am convinced that our cosmos is a cellular automaton, but rather that complex systems provide a tool even more powerful than traditional math for modeling, and thus in some ways understanding, our world.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.