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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.
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 His studies on animals laid the foundation for the biological sciences and weren't superceded until two THOUSAND years after his death.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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www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/1921/index.html
www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/1921/press.html