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Top Ten Physics Experiments Of All Times
MarkedMan writes "The New York Times is running an article about the top ten physics experiments of all time. You may disagree with the order, but it is hard to imagine pulling any one of these from the top ten. And most of them could be done by a patient amateur, at least one with access to cannonballs." The Times article wraps up the work by Robert P. Crease mentioned a few weeks ago.
i remember when i first tried to make a perpetual motion machine... then somehow it caught fire in my living room... i dont remember how i tried to build it though...
I know a guy named Sig.
Wouldn't it be "of all time"?
that signup really sucks it
I read on Slashdot that gravity may be faster than the speed of light. By experimenting with this, we could have faster than light communication, by building a mass movement detection device. If we could beam porn instantaneously to Mars, or anywhere on the Earth, then we don't need to let physics advance anymore.
Hopefully not duplicatable in a garage.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
For all the lamers who don't want to register, Google News is your friend.
My favorite would have to be the wave vs. particle experiment involving the two slits. Is it jsut called the double slit experiment?
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
What could you do with 50Lbs. of Silly Putty?
Check out the link:
http://www.sunbelt-software.com/stu/putty/
This one simple act covers physics(gravity Acceleration, fluid dynamics and whatnot) and is so simple but so fun.
Too bad its sponsored by a windows software publishing house.
FUN!
I still think that Neil Armstrong deserves credit for testing the theory that only with a minimal gravity field as that which the moon has, could anyone even hit a golf ball as far as Tiger Woods.
Special relativity changed the direction of physics in the 20th century. All modern physics incorporates it at a fundamental level. In some sense it is one of the most influential physics experiments of all time.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
sounds like pr0n
If anyone from this morning's traffic jam is listening, learn from the webpage linked above:
On my evening commute on I-5 southbound from Everett there is always a right-lane traffic jam at one of the Lynnwood off-ramps. Close-packed cars must crawl along at 2mph for a very long time. Therefore I intentionally approached that distant jam in the right lane, and started letting a REALLY huge empty space open up ahead of me. By the time I hit the jam, there was maybe 1000ft of empty road ahead of me. Sure enough, my big empty space stopped traffic from feeding it from behind, while the front of the jam kept dissolving as usual. By the time I arrived, the jam was about half the size it had been. Amazing. This wasn't any little traffic wave, yet one single driver was able to take a huge bite out of it.
*gruntle!*
J00r first post failed, cockgobbler. You suck.
Don't know if this'll work for anyone else but I just registered,
username = BobDolio
password = bobdole
Anyway, I was wondering, why didn't the New York time's have a small one line description of each experiment (in order) then you can click on one and go to the full length description. I think it would be a lot easier to read it that way. Oh well.
> which ended 15 minutes ago.
Conducted in 7th grade; proved that farts are flammable.
Just because the Michelson-Morley experiment was based on the wrong
idea doesn't mean it's not an important experiment in the history of
science. It's probably the one that gets pounded into the heads of
high-school physics students the most. I mean, you can't explain
*why* it was wrong without understanding Special Relativity and
E=MC^2, which is pretty cool. And the whole discussion of SR vs. the
Lorentz Transform is fascinating in itself. I think the editors of
this article were biased toward experiments that were easy to explain
and understand, and shied away from experiments that failed but still
advanced science.
Remember when Taco and Cowboy were "expirementing" sexually? Here are some pics of their adventures. OUCH SAYS TACO
can't even do a goatse.cx link correctly. It must suck to be you.
Is to drink 30 beers, and measure how long I spend at the porcalin alter. I hypothesise that the more beers I drink the actual time at the alter seems to slow down... more experiments needed though. Hence the more beers, the more time seems to dilate. Interesting.
Interesting! Tell us more about this encounter tomorrow.
I love the New York Times! It's so objective! (Stupid Howard, ruining what was the most influencial newspaper in the world.)
What about the Manhatten Project?
ObMetricVsImperial
He took a board 12 cubits long and half a cubit wide
Even without knowing how much a cubit is I know how it looks like. But then...
(about 20 feet by 10 inches)
WTF?? 20 feet, that's about 20 / 3.3 is about 6 meters. And 10 inches, that's euh 25 centimers. Yeah, it still looks the same size but oh boy, 20 feet by 10 inches... *shudder*
bash$
I don't think the top 3 physics experiments of all times are:
1. Create an account
2. Tell us about yourself
and
3. Select exclusive benefits
where's the cat-buttered-toast infinite power engine in all of this?
Um...Theodore Maiman/Charles Townes and the Laser! Anyone heard of those? I hear they're all the rage in Europe...and everywhere else. Maiman single-handedly took the theoretical ideas of Townes and constructed the first crude but working laser. That was a landmark achievement, and it was an important if not ingenious experiment in the history of science. Of course, since Townes got the Nobel prize, Maiman has sort of been relegated to obscurity, but that doesn't make his laser work any less important. Remember that next time you load up Warcraft III in that CDROM drive. How do you think it's being read, anyway?
not an experiment. All the physics had already been done, the question was just weather it we be possible to engineer the bomb.
...the case where the guy induces linquid nitrogen
Take off every 'sig'!
All your 'sig' are belong to us!
... Physics Experiments Of All time would have to have Millikan's oil-drop test at a secure #1.
Here's a brief synopsis in pseudocode for you to try out at home:
LOOP:
An electron. Yep. Still discrete.
Another. Yep. Still discrete.
Two electrons. Yep. Still discrete.
WHILE nrTries LESS_THAN 5543 GOTO LOOP
The article is just two clicks away
How does the goatse server survive such widespread abuse from the internet over?
All they need now is comments and I'll never come here again... Oh, thats right, they run the Groups...
Never mind, usenet went to the dogs a long time ago..
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
As for the top 10 experiments of all time, as the tagline indicates, that remains to be seen.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
What I find interesting is that two of the experiments were not experiments at all in the traditional sense. They were thought experiments: Galileo is generally thought not to have dropped cannonballs from the Leaning Tower of Pisa -- instead, his writings describe a thought experiment involving two unequal weights tied together with a rope. And Young's double slit experiment was also a thought experiment -- the verification came many years later.
In the same way Mrs. Einstein did much of the work on special relativity (the divorce settlement gave her the Nobel money but Einstein was allowed to have the prize in his sole name), Geoffrey Hewish managed to leave Jocelyn Bell out of the account when she discovered pulsars, and Newton was in touch with most of the scientific talent of his day - and famously tried to rubbish anyone who might have had any of his ideas first (Leibnitz and calculus, for instance.)
I think this list itself is OK - but I'd rather have a less pop science look at the attributions, which might show a lot more about how science REALLY works, i.e. not mad scientist with weird assistant raising the lightning rod.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Now either the Earth's been packing on the pounds over the last 200 years like a pregnant 30-year-old Polynesian, or the Times has some serious problem with HTML formatting.
woof.
Editors:
PLEASE! When you link to a NYT article, link to the anonymizer page for it instead.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
Which is around 6 tons. Perhaps 6.0 x 10^24 kilograms would be a little closer...
Andrew
People who have the most menial, boring jobs have the most time to intimately study commonly-ignored things like gravity.
on I-5 southbound from Everett there is always a right-lane traffic jam at one of the Lynnwood off-ramps.
this is bullshit. first off, there are no lynnwood offramps from i-5. this person is confused with i-405 and is likely not from seattle. second, nobody ever averaged 35mph on i520 at rush hour in '98 as this person claims. those were boom times here and i was on 520 then. to get 1000ft like this person claims you would have had to put on the e-brake and wait for about 45min and just sit... no nevermind that wouldn't work, 1000 cars would cut in front of you... nobody had 1000ft of space in '98.
i was a contractor at microsoft at the time (hangs head in shame)... if i left during rush hour (between 4:00-8:30pm at the time) it took over 2hrs to make it home over 520. off rush hour i could make in in 15min. i assure you that if this person averaged 35mph it was not rush hour. i found a different solution - i started taking the bus (if you have to cross 520 you're company probably can get a free bus pass for you!) it takes that nifty 3 or more carpool lane that is always empty and i could make it home in around 30min during rush hour. of course i no longer make that horrid commute, but i still take the bus because this area can't handle more traffic!
Experiment #3, Millikan's oil drop, is widely regarded as the most famous example of cooking data in scientific history. This analysis by David Goodstein gives compelling evidence to the contrary. It in Goodstein claims that some of Millikan's unused data was the most supportive of his theory, and that even if he had used all the data he had gathered, it would not have made his results any less compelling.
(It seems Millikan had many other strikes against him. The question of fraud is brought up on page 3.)
@AlexSheive
My all time favourite is the one you do in the lab where all the points on the graph come out in a straight line without having to (ahem) ignore any that are "obviously errors".
In our high school science class, we had to built an interesting contraption that was a glass tube filled with water, with a big plastic syringe on one end and a small tube on the other. A cigarette was attached to the small tube, and the smoke was pulled into the contraption.
I never understood why our science teacher winked at us as he left the room, but years later I realised that everyone in the class had effectively built a bong.
Egg into the bottle!!!!
Burma?
Hmmmm - he doesn't get to the cinema much does he?
--
Reverse outsourcing: it's the future
Each day, /. gives me another reason to ask myself, "Can the editors really be that stupid?"
.-.--
"When Robert P. Crease, a member of the philosophy department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory, recently asked physicists to nominate the most beautiful experiment of all time, the 10 winners were largely solo performances, involving at most a few assistants. Most of the experiments -- which are listed in this month's Physics World -- took place on tabletops and none required more computational power than that of a slide rule or calculator."
Note that the NY Times is just telling us what's been published elsewhere. Physicists themselves voted on the experiments.
On the internet, no one knows you're a frog.
gravity, which holds that the strength of attraction between two objects increases with the square of their masses and decreases with the square of the distance between them.
No, attraction between two objects increases with the PRODUCT of their masses.
Millikan:
each droplet picked up a slight charge of static electricity as it traveled through the air
No, he used radiation to alter the charge on the drops. I believe he used an alpha particle source.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
take two tin cans attach string compete with AT&T that's physics! oh, that and the old favourite card game "52 pickup"
--- Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit? | Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?
What?! There is most definitely offramps into lynnwood from I-5. There is one southbound onto 196th, and two northbound, one onto 198th and one onto 44th. And yes, there is almost always a traffic jam at the 196th exit southbound.
I think it is you who are likely not from Seattle.
Heinrich Hertz's verifcation of the existence of Electromagnetic radiation in 1887 must surely be there!
Its implications touch every part of our lives and are the foundation stone of much that followed.
The unification of electricity and magnetism, first published by James Clerk Maxwell in 1864, is a very underrated milestone in physics history. Just thing about it... taking the leap to electrical and magnetic waves and providing substantial evidence that light was electromagnetic in nature! And Hertz's experiments verify much of this.
I'm glad someone else has figured this stuff out. Here is a principle I think he hints at understanding, but doesn't state outright:
Imagine that everyone has to go at half their usual speed to work. Then it takes each person twice as long to get to work. This means at any given time, there are twice as many cars on the road. With twice as many cars, things are likely to slow down even more...
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Let us not forget the great physicist Elmore C. Biggins, whose work at Adobe Software Labs in the early 1800's measured the speed of light to an astonishing 3,059,299,000,000,000 points per hour (everything was relative to 12 point fonts then.)
I believe that'd have to be my first physics professor showing us how a balloon filled with air will shrink in liquid nitrogen, then accidentally dropping his good pen in it trying to pry the frozen balloon back out.
While this are beautiful experiments, the story doesn't make clear that this list is originally from Physics World and is only a list of physics experiments, taking "physics experiments" in it's most narrow form, it doesn't include astronomy observations (which admittedly is different to an experiment) like Hubble's recession of galaxies with lead to the Big Bang, of Penzias and Wilson's discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation which (admittedly accidently) confirmed it. If it was really "Science's" most beautiful experiments it misses out many experiments e.g. Crick & Watson's DNA Discovery. This doesn't detract from it as a list of *physics* experiments though, although lots of people have suggested others to add (no modern particles physics experiments? discovery of quarks or W/Z bosons etc.?) I wouldn't personally advocate taking any of those off the list to make way for the other that I or anyone else has suggested so it's a great list as far as I'm concerned!
Struggling to find a day everyone can make? WhenShallWe.com
Too true. In fact, Aristotle was a great observer. I suspect that if he had been around in the Renaissance he'd have been right there with Galileo mocking the Schoolmen for their stupidity and their desire to believe what they read in books. It was the prelates of the church and the regents of the universities who were idiots, and people like Galileo and Francis Bacon who went to prison or house arrest because they stood up to them.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
It was as though bullets had ricocheted off Jell-O.
Boy, i wanna see that jell-o!
of the Young's double slit experiment with single electrons. This showed that a single electron interacted with both slits as a wave (i.e. it passed through both slits at once), then interfered with itself before interacting with the detector as a particle at a point. A truly stunning demonstration of the reality of wave-particle duality, and the reason this one got the top slot.
Duh.
freedom, n. Allowing people you don't like to do things you disapprove of.
Aristotelian analysis of The Whole dictates that comes after Prior Analytics and before Posterior Analytics.
There is no evidence that Galileo ever dropped cannon balls off of the leaning tower of Pisa or elsewhere.
http://www.darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1995-04.h tml.
Enough said.
> The one thing that truly travels faster than light is monarchy.
One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can't. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. The Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships that were powered by bad news but they didn't work particularly well and were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere that there wasn't really any point in being there.
Mostly Harmless, chapter 1 (italics mine)
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
I know this has probably been asked to death, but what is the deal with so many NY Times articles being linked from Slashdot? I hardly ever see any linked to Foxnews or CNN or even the New York Post. What about USA Today or The Wall Street Journal? Some days Slashdot seems to just act like a Fark front end for the New York Times and you go to click on the link and you have to subscribe on top of it. Why link to a site that's so vehemently against the idea of free open linking? Link to the AP news article or a Yahoo article or anything, but don't continue to support these sites that require even more useless registration information. Eventually the whole web will be nothing but subscription-only sites with "free" registrations and it'll be a pain in the ass to hyperlink from one place to another.
No, the principle is that paradoxically, if you want to drive faster overall, you need to drive slower at some points. If you continually go as fast as you can go right behind the car in front of you, it creates traffic jams. Driving at the average speed and leaving a large gap between you and the car ahead of you can speed up all the traffic behind you.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Rosa Parks, Hitler, Scientology, UFOs, Internet Explorer, Churchill... you have quite an imagination sir!
How the heck did he keep 30 cars from cutting in from the next lane over?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I started leaving a large gap between my car and the car ahead of me in stop and go traffic several years ago. I've never had significant problems with cars cutting in and filling up the gap. Read the FAQ on his web page to get some explanations why.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Effectively, Aristotle recorded what was accepted by the aristocracy as the common sense of the day. (No danger of him being asked to drink hemlock.) I am not aware that he actually performed a single experiment. Aristotle regarded experimentation 'beneath right thinkers'. His 'thought exercises' laid the foundation for idiocy that has lasted over two thousand years, culminating in the Catholic church and western religion. Essentially, he passed his opinion off as fact and the western world bought it. Plato would not have been pleased nor proud. Sorry, his science was and is bad.
The top ten list wasn't about the most influential physics experiments. It was about the most beautiful - the moment of clarity experiments. The article explained that at the beginning. I am sure that if they polled the same people and had them come up with the most influential experiments, the list would come out a little different.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I started leaving a large gap between my car and the car ahead of me in stop and go traffic several years ago. I've never had significant problems with cars cutting in and filling up the gap. Read the FAQ on his web page to get some explanations why.
This doesn't work around Birmingham, Alabama. Damn NASCAR fans don't think they're going anywhere if they aren't passing people and cutting them off.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Not including the Penzia / Wilson microwave background is a real travesty!
There are load more - the NYT list is poor.
Tis true. I've never understood the point of these "greatest" lists. Apparently Americans don't care about science unless it's formulated into some sort of ersatz popularity contest like the Emmys...
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
How do you think the article would be received if the NYT said "M-M thought that there was ether all around us, and they could prove it. They would analyze the doppler shift in light between perpendicular readings of the same aparatus, and the motion of the Earth, travelling through that medium, would lead to a finding. But they were wrong, so I told you all that for nothing".
Normal people can understand that heavier things do not fall faster than light things. Normal people can't understand a lot of wonderful physics experiments.
It wasn't entitled "top 10 most influential physics experiments of all time", it was entitled "10 most beautiful...".
Start with the title, and work your way down. Posts like these wouldn't exist with people who actually read and comprehend content.
I guess to get an article posted you have to misquote it:
2002-09-24 18:57:39 10 Most Beautiful Experiments (articles,science) (rejected)
Millikan didn't do anything other than publish the paper that Fletcher wrote. Fletcher performed the experiment. Later they agreed that Millikan could be sole author of Fletcher's paper. You would think that now that the truth is know people would give credit where it is due.
Lasers Controlled Games!
I dunno if the author of this piece actually knows this, but traffic lights are actually designed for this, its a way to keep drivers from breaking the speed limit (or at least thats what it's designed to be anyway. Most drivers just break the limit anyway and drive on - creating the "waves" that the author talks about in the linked article
But why protest? NYT has a great website, with great articles that are interesting to read. I created a login years ago, and so they're aggregating data on which articles I read. I don't get any email from them; they leave me alone. They don't sell my personal information or my email address.
/. user, so the same thing could happen on this site. Yet I don't see you complaining about having to register to post comments here. What's the difference?
It seems to me that there's nothing to protest - they give me a service for free, and in exchange, I let them keep track of the stories I read. This is not a privacy invasion. There's no injustice going on - it's a simple exchange.
You're a registered
I think a fairer statement about the social sciences is not that they are useless, but that they progress only very slowly due to the difficulty of experimentation and the massive complexity of the phenomena being studied._ ____
_______________________________________
Your above points are ecellently stated - but they neglect the insitutional aversion to "hard" science in many of the social science fields (or even in some branches of biology) to numerical methods of analysis.
I know, it is probably too late to get modded up, but here it goes anyway...
IMHO Aristotle would have been very proud to have been called an idiot. The term idiot comes from the Ancient Greek word "ho idiotos" (or "hae idiotae" for the female form).
The word means "the private man" or "one who thinks for himself". In my opinion being called an idiot is one of the greatest compliments a man can receive.
Oh. That explains why Archimedes' bathtub wasn't included.
(You know; Archimedes was trying to figure out how to find out if a crown was made out of gold or not; he couldn't figure it out until he saw the displacement of water when he got into the bathtub, fiddled around getting in and out, etc., and finally jumped up and ran around Syracuse naked shouting "I have found it! [Heureka!]"
This page at Drexel has the details.)
So, why am I so sure from the title I know why this wasn't included as one of Science's 10 Most Beautiful Experiments? Have you seen what Archimedes looked like?
Here's a mirror of the video (the 35mb version).
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Please list your references and sources. As all good scientists do.
Mrs. Einstein discovered SR? Some conspiracy theory floating around I've heard before.
Jocelyn Bell is widely known in the physics community to be the discoverer of pulsars. So what are you talking about?
And pls, deriving equations is one thing, getting the idea to do the calculation is another. Like one of my physics friend like to say : "It is easy to compute, it's hard to think." So Rutherford gets the credit, and deservedly so.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Does this mean you're still trying? Errr, dude, there's something you should know.....
I realize this is /., but couldn't we agree to spell this amazing scientist's name correctly?
And I agree that this experiment should be on the list. However, it is a damn good list.
Guns don't kill people -- people kill people.
But the guns seem to help a bit. (apologies to Eddie Izzard)
To test whether or not George W. Bush's brain
is lighter than air.
Woot!
Oops, my second link didn't appear...
Then there's this one which shows some of the things your browser reveals about your computer (expecially if you use IE)
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.