Most Beautiful Experiment in Physics

An anonymous reader writes "Robert P. Crease has concluded his poll asking what the most beautiful experiment in physics is. The winner was Young's double slit experiment performed using a single electron. Attentive readers will remember that Slashdot had a discussion of Crease's question previously, which Crease mentions in his current article." If you're unfamiliar with the experiment, Google pulls up a bunch of applets and demonstrations.

Comments

no WAY!!!

[lingqi]

the most beautiful experiment is, has been, and always will be the practical aspects of

* photons gets converted to electric impulses;
* these electric impulsese are stored, usually by dielectric tunneling, into a floating gate (Flash memory)
* the information is then read back, sent through 7 (read it, it's SEVEN) layers of network stack, to a physical link
* the data is digitized into more packets of light, and sent across the atlantic from RUSSIA to the US.
* after more routing (some in light-packets, some in electrical), it climbs back up the 7-layers.
* mozilla interprets them, and through some seriously complex transistor networks, the signals cause some polymers to twist just the right amount
* and i see some pr0n.

wait a sec; that would probabbly be "the most beautiful engineering feat"... ahh fsck it.

My favorite Physics Experiment

[brad3378]

Measuring the speed of light.
For our experiment, we used a mirror set up to rotate at 6000 RPM. A laser is aimed at the rotating mirror, bounces about 20 meters across the room and back. The theory is that the rotating mirror will slightly rotate by the time the beam of light returns to the rotating mirror. Even at 6000 RPM, the mirror only rotates a very small amount, but enough for the laser's endpoint to change a few fractions of a mm.

By knowing the displacement between the endpoints of the laser at 6000 RPM and 3000 RPM, we could easily calculate the angle that the mirror rotated from the initial path to the return path across the room. Using this info, we solved for the time required for it to rotate that angle. That is the time required for the Laser to travel across the room and back. The distance:time ratio is the speed of light. Mad props to the dude/chick who designed that experiment.

Re:WOOHOO!!!!

[The Wing Lover]

Although Slashdot bills itself as "news for nerds", its audience evidently includes a large number of science-history aficionados.

I love how this sentence is written as if it's some sort of contradiction.

Re:Simple != Simple

[ImaLamer]

it demonstrates that light travels as waves, until you fire only 1 photon then you prove it travels as particles as well.

Actually, it proves that light travels as either a wave or particle.

It depends on the experiment. An experiment looking for particles will show particles, and waves, waves.

Check out The Copenhagen Interpretation

I love Quantum Theory so much I read the same book three times: In Search of Schrodinger's Cat. Might be out of date, but an easy read for us lay men.

Re:Quantum Polaroid Demonstration

[sconeu]

I once heard the three polarizer experiment described as follows.

You have a field with cows. To make sure that now cows get out, you put up two fences. They stay in their field. But you're really paranoid, so you put a third fence in between the two. Now, all of a sudden, one fourth of your cows are wandering in your neighbor's field.