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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.
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.
Other ones missing are
JJ Thompsons backscattering of alpha particles from gold foil - changed to model of the atom from the plum pudding model to the nuclear model
Penzia and Wilson discovery of the microwave background - changed the model of the universe.
Discovery of superconductivity.
Any of Faraday's electromagnetism experiments - lead directly to Maxwell's field theory of electromagnetism, and hence to moden field based physics.
There are load more - the NYT list is poor.
Absolutely! I am always amazed when this experiment doesn't get its due when people compose "Top Ten" lists. Aside from the impact it had, it is one of the great examples of the significance of negative results. They tried to find the Doppler shift in light caused by the aether, and when they didn't find it, did they just shrug and say, "Negative results.", and drop it? NO! This was the classic "dog that didn't bark", and it was important!
I apologize for getting up on this soapbox, but I've several times had the expereience of submitting a manuscript to a journal and having the reviewers criticize me for including negative results along with the positive ones, as though we shouldn't even discuss negative results, much less try to draw conclusions from them. IMNSHO, if the experiment was well designed and there are no artifacts creeping in, then an experiment is only a failure if you don't learn anything from it.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
Science lived in Aristotle's shadow for a long time. This was both good and bad. Good, becuase Aristotle was quite clever and there was a lot of useful stuff in his shadow. Bad, because his work was taken as gospel, complete and correct in all areas.
I think it's very easy to forget about how different the minds of people are between now and then. Concepts we take for granted - uniform space, causality, the scientific method, non-contact forces - wern't even a part of the intellectual landscape. I think if anyone ever actually invented a time machine, going back far enough would encounter humans almost alien in thought. We all share premises from growing up in this era. They had different premises, perhaps different enough to hinder communication even if a common language was found.
Every time you read something obvious in one of Aristotle's works, remember - it's only obvious now because he wrote it then. Imagine, perhaps, a world where it's not obvious and think about how we got from there to here.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
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.
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.
OK, so I think this is slightly unfair. In a previous life (or so it sometimes seems...) I was an English Literature major. As it turned out, I was one of the most unhappy English Literature majors there ever was, precisely because of the lack of empirical content in something like literary theory. Reading great literature for its own sweet sake was very easy; sometimes gaining insight or greater appreciation for a work of literature or art via thoughtful and persuasive criticism clearly also has its place. Mere arguments about the content or validity of critical theories...that was hell. The humanities are intellectual endeavors whose use lies in the fact that they make us glad and help us see beauty. But I have no idea how you can make any of it empirical in and of itself, or why you should think that critical theory could ever be improved by experiments...
Now, social sciences have different problems. In most cases, I would argue the problem is not that social scientists don't want to do experiments but that the correct experiments to do are difficult or impossible to execute. This is obviously a big problem that can get compounded by attempts to argue that flawed experiments are just as good, that minor results are far-sweeping, etc.
Frankly, another problem is that people who get very interested in the problems studied by social scientists are often tragically enough the people whose appreciation and aptitude for "real" science is not as high. (Now this is why I find economics a particularly weird field; economists usually *do* have a "hard science" orientation, but some of them are still pretty massively opposed to empirical work in their own field. Some of this has to be because good experiments would be very tough, but not all of it.)
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.
Babar