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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.
For all the lamers who don't want to register, Google News is your friend.
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!*
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 when someones already done it for you!!w .nytimes.com/pages/world/index.html
http://www.majcher.com/nytview.html?url=http://ww
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.
Article summary: Three out of ten great scientists rose to prominence by proving Aristotle was an idiot.
Proving that *Aristotle* was an idiot? Aristotle is widely known as a person who was probably among the most intelligent humans ever to have lived.
Aristotle taught Alexander the Great. His studies on animals laid the foundation for the biological sciences and weren't superceded until two THOUSAND years after his death.
Aristotle made significant contributions to logic (He and Plato founded the basic principals of logic, such as some of the rules of inference), physics, astronomy, meteorology, zoology, metaphysics, theology, psychology, political science, economics, ethics, rhetoric, and poetics However, still more astounding is the fact that the majority of these subjects did not exist as such before him, so that he would have been the first to conceive of and establish them, as systematic disciplines.
His writings, some of which you should recognize as some of the most influential documents ever written, include:
On logic
Categories
On Interpretation
Prior Analytics
Posterior Analytics
Topics
Sophistical Refutations
On physics
Physics
On The Heavens
On Generation and Corruption
On psychology and natural history
On The Soul
On The Parts Of Animals
On The Motion Of Animals
On The History Of Animals
On The Gait Of Animals
On The Generation Of Animals
On ethics
Nicomachean Ethics
Eudemian Ethics
Magna Moralia
Politics
Rhetoric
Poetics
General investigation of the things
Metaphysics
Other works
Meteorology
On Dreams
On Longevity and Shortness Of Life
On Memory and Reminiscence
On Prophesying by Dreams
On Sense and The Sensible
On Sleep and Sleeplessness
On Youth and Old Age, On Life And Death, On Breathing
This person contributed more and to more areas than any other who has ever lived. That some of his sciences were found to be incorrect does not change this, particularly when you consider that he laid the foundation of the principal ideas of what we call physics more than two thousand years before his physics were superceded. Calling this man a moron is like calling Linux Torvalds a newbie programmer, or Windows 95 a reliable server operating system. In fact, I cannot think of anything more wrong than to use "Aristotle" and "idiot" in the same sentence without a "not". Name one person who has done even close to as much for human knowledge and understanding.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
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.
www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/1921/index.html
www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/1921/press.html
On the other hand, fits just fine in a garage, at least in a big garage - some of the larger bombs were ~20 feet long, but most designs are smaller. THe uranium refinement equipment takes up more space, but they say that the centrifuge-based systems are a lot more compact and realistic than the huge UF6 gas-diffusion plants used in the first nukes.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The original Physics world Article is at
http://physicsweb.org/article/world/15/9/2