Slashdot Mirror
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
first post bitches
This Experiment!
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I'm somewhere where I don't know where I am.
first post w00t. Pretty good article, too bad it's ny times =\
I have a date with him tomorrow. He gives excellent head.
By "Jesus Christ" I mean some guy at the coffee shop I go to.
By "date" I mean him giving me head in the bathroom of that coffee shop.
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the strongest word is still the word "free"
where.. the waves cancel out and form zebra patterns by whattsaname...
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.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
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!*
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.
It can be seen HERE
> which ended 15 minutes ago.
Conducted in 7th grade; proved that farts are flammable.
Here They Are, Science's 10 Most Beautiful Experiments
By GEORGE JOHNSON
hether they are blasting apart subatomic particles in accelerators, sequencing the genome or analyzing the wobble of a distant star, the experiments that grab the world's attention often cost millions of dollars to execute and produce torrents of data to be processed over months by supercomputers. Some research groups have grown to the size of small companies.
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But ultimately science comes down to the individual mind grappling with something mysterious. 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.
What they have in common is that they epitomize the elusive quality scientists call beauty. This is beauty in the classical sense: the logical simplicity of the apparatus, like the logical simplicity of the analysis, seems as inevitable and pure as the lines of a Greek monument. Confusion and ambiguity are momentarily swept aside, and something new about nature becomes clear.
The list in Physics World was ranked according to popularity, first place going to an experiment that vividly demonstrated the quantum nature of the physical world. But science is a cumulative enterprise -- that is part of its beauty. Rearranged chronologically and annotated below, the winners provide a bird's-eye view of more than 2,000 years of discovery.
Eratosthenes' measurement of the Earth's circumference
At noon on the summer solstice in the Egyptian town now called Aswan, the sun hovers straight overhead: objects cast no shadow and sunlight falls directly down a deep well. When he read this fact, Eratosthenes, the librarian at Alexandria in the third century B.C., realized he had the information he needed to estimate the circumference of the planet. On the same day and time, he measured shadows in Alexandria, finding that the solar rays there had a bit of a slant, deviating from the vertical by about seven degrees.
The rest was just geometry. Assuming the earth is spherical, its circumference spans 360 degrees. So if the two cities are seven degrees apart, that would constitute seven-360ths of the full circle -- about one-fiftieth. Estimating from travel time that the towns were 5,000 "stadia" apart, Eratosthenes concluded that the earth must be 50 times that size -- 250,000 stadia in girth. Scholars differ over the length of a Greek stadium, so it is impossible to know just how accurate he was. But by some reckonings, he was off by only about 5 percent. (Ranking: 7)
Galileo's experiment on falling objects
In the late 1500's, everyone knew that heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones. After all, Aristotle had said so. That an ancient Greek scholar still held such sway was a sign of how far science had declined during the dark ages.
Galileo Galilei, who held a chair in mathematics at the University of Pisa, was impudent enough to question the common knowledge. The story has become part of the folklore of science: he is reputed to have dropped two different weights from the town's Leaning Tower showing that they landed at the same time. His challenges to Aristotle may have cost Galileo his job, but he had demonstrated the importance of taking nature, not human authority, as the final arbiter in matters of science. (Ranking: 2)
Galileo's experiments with rolling balls down inclined planes
Galileo continued to refine his ideas about objects in motion. He took a board 12 cubits long and half a cubit wide (about 20 feet by 10 inches) and cut a groove, as straight and smooth as possible, down the center. He inclined the plane and rolled brass balls down it, timing their descent with a water clock -- a large vessel that emptied through a thin tube into a glass. After each run he would weigh the water that had flowed out -- his measurement of elapsed time -- and compare it with the distance the ball had traveled.
Aristotle would have predicted that the velocity of a rolling ball was constant: double its time in transit and you would double the distance it traversed. Galileo was able to show that the distance is actually proportional to the square of the time: Double it and the ball would go four times as far. The reason is that it is being constantly accelerated by gravity. (Ranking: 8)
Newton's decomposition of sunlight with a prism
Isaac Newton was born the year Galileo died. He graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1665, then holed up at home for a couple of years waiting out the plague. He had no trouble keeping himself occupied.
The common wisdom held that white light is the purest form (Aristotle again) and that colored light must therefore have been altered somehow. To test this hypothesis, Newton shined a beam of sunlight through a glass prism and showed that it decomposed into a spectrum cast on the wall. People already knew about rainbows, of course, but they were considered to be little more than pretty aberrations. Actually, Newton concluded, it was these colors -- red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet and the gradations in between -- that were fundamental. What seemed simple on the surface, a beam of white light, was, if one looked deeper, beautifully complex. (Ranking: 4)
Cavendish's torsion-bar experiment
Another of Newton's contributions was his theory of 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. But how strong is gravity in the first place?
In the late 1700's an English scientist, Henry Cavendish, decided to find out. He took a six-foot wooden rod and attached small metal spheres to each end, like a dumbbell, then suspended it from a wire. Two 350-pound lead spheres placed nearby exerted just enough gravitational force to tug at the smaller balls, causing the dumbbell to move and the wire to twist. By mounting finely etched pieces of ivory on the end of each arm and in the sides of the case, he could measure the subtle displacement. To guard against the influence of air currents, the apparatus (called a torsion balance) was enclosed in a room and observed with telescopes mounted on each side.
The result was a remarkably accurate estimate of a parameter called the gravitational constant, and from that Cavendish was able to calculate the density and mass of the earth. Erastothenes had measured how far around the planet was. Cavendish had weighed it: 6.0 x 1024 kilograms, or about 13 trillion trillion pounds. (Ranking: 6)
Young's light-interference experiment
Newton wasn't always right. Through various arguments, he had moved the scientific mainstream toward the conviction that light consists exclusively of particles rather than waves. In 1803, Thomas Young, an English physician and physicist, put the idea to a test. He cut a hole in a window shutter, covered it with a thick piece of paper punctured with a tiny pinhole and used a mirror to divert the thin beam that came shining through. Then he took "a slip of a card, about one-thirtieth of an inch in breadth" and held it edgewise in the path of the beam, dividing it in two. The result was a shadow of alternating light and dark bands -- a phenomenon that could be explained if the two beams were interacting like waves.
Bright bands appeared where two crests overlapped, reinforcing each other; dark bands marked where a crest lined up with a trough, neutralizing each other.
The demonstration was often repeated over the years using a card with two holes to divide the beam. These so-called double-slit experiments became the standard for determining wavelike motion -- a fact that was to become especially important a century later when quantum theory began. (Ranking: 5)
Foucault's pendulum
Last year when scientists mounted a pendulum above the South Pole and watched it swing, they were replicating a celebrated demonstration performed in Paris in 1851. Using a steel wire 220 feet long, the French scientist Jean-Bernard-Léon Foucault suspended a 62-pound iron ball from the dome of the Panthéon and set it in motion, rocking back and forth. To mark its progress he attached a stylus to the ball and placed a ring of damp sand on the floor below.
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The audience watched in awe as the pendulum inexplicably appeared to rotate, leaving a slightly different trace with each swing. Actually it was the floor of the Panthéon that was slowly moving, and Foucault had shown, more convincingly than ever, that the earth revolves on its axis. At the latitude of Paris, the pendulum's path would complete a full clockwise rotation every 30 hours; on the Southern Hemisphere it would rotate counterclockwise, and on the Equator it wouldn't revolve at all. At the South Pole, as the modern-day scientists confirmed, the period of rotation is 24 hours. (Ranking: 10)
Millikan's oil-drop experiment
Since ancient times, scientists had studied electricity -- an intangible essence that came from the sky as lightning or could be produced simply by running a brush through your hair. In 1897 (in an experiment that could easily have made this list) the British physicist J. J. Thomson had established that electricity consisted of negatively charged particles -- electrons. It was left to the American scientist Robert Millikan, in 1909, to measure their charge.
Using a perfume atomizer, he sprayed tiny drops of oil into a transparent chamber. At the top and bottom were metal plates hooked to a battery, making one positive and the other negative. Since each droplet picked up a slight charge of static electricity as it traveled through the air, the speed of its descent could be controlled by altering the voltage on the plates. (When this electrical force matched the force of gravity, a droplet -- "like a brilliant star on a black background" -- would hover in midair.)
Millikan observed one drop after another, varying the voltage and noting the effect. After many repetitions he concluded that charge could only assume certain fixed values. The smallest of these portions was none other than the charge of a single electron. (Ranking: 3)
Rutherford's discovery of the nucleus
When Ernest Rutherford was experimenting with radioactivity at the University of Manchester in 1911, atoms were generally believed to consist of large mushy blobs of positive electrical charge with electrons embedded inside -- the "plum pudding" model. But when he and his assistants fired tiny positively charged projectiles, called alpha particles, at a thin foil of gold, they were surprised that a tiny percentage of them came bouncing back. It was as though bullets had ricocheted off Jell-O.
Rutherford calculated that actually atoms were not so mushy after all. Most of the mass must be concentrated in a tiny core, now called the nucleus, with the electrons hovering around it. With amendments from quantum theory, this image of the atom persists today. (Ranking: 9)
Young's double-slit experiment applied to the interference of single electrons
Neither Newton nor Young was quite right about the nature of light. Though it is not simply made of particles, neither can it be described purely as a wave. In the first five years of the 20th century, Max Planck and then Albert Einstein showed, respectively, that light is emitted and absorbed in packets -- called photons. But other experiments continued to verify that light is also wavelike.
It took quantum theory, developed over the next few decades, to reconcile how both ideas could be true: photons and other subatomic particles -- electrons, protons, and so forth -- exhibit two complementary qualities; they are, as one physicist put it, "wavicles."
To explain the idea, to others and themselves, physicists often used a thought experiment, in which Young's double-slit demonstration is repeated with a beam of electrons instead of light. Obeying the laws of quantum mechanics, the stream of particles would split in two, and the smaller streams would interfere with each other, leaving the same kind of light- and dark-striped pattern as was cast by light. Particles would act like waves.
According to an accompanying article in Physics World, by the magazine's editor, Peter Rodgers, it wasn't until 1961 that someone (Claus Jönsson of Tübingen) carried out the experiment in the real world.
By that time no one was really surprised by the outcome, and the report, like most, was absorbed anonymously into science. (Ranking: 1)
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.
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
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?
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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.
-
- - 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.
No. 1 - Pull my finger!
No doubt number one!
Speaking of getting buttered up and being toasted!!!
So I came home from work the other day to discover my cat mittens laying on the floor. His breathing was very shallow and his eyes were very glassy. When I approached him I noticed a belt tied around his arm and both a syringe and a bent spoon laying beside him. Despite all his promises to the contrary, my beloved Mittens has started shooting up smack again!
Fortunately the paramedics showed up quickly and gave him some naloxone which saved him. Unfortunately the problem of my cat being addicted to heroin still remains. Last week he sold my stereo and this weekend Mittens offered to perform oral sex on me in exchange for a hit.
I love my cat and want to see him off this horrible drug. Unfortunately he won't stop on his own! Mittens says he can quit anytime he wants to and becomes combative when I force the issue. I'm tired of seeing him throw his life away. He could've been a great mouser, one of the best before he got hooked.
Can anyone recommend a way to get my cat off heroin? It would be much appreciated.
Also, this must be said; I dont want to fuck my poor cat mittens. I love him dearly. IF he offered oral sex as a hit, and I would never compromise the sanctity and trust of our brotherly (non gay, non sexual) relationship! I thank youall for your genuine concern for the safety of my genitals with regard to animal contact with sandpapery cat tongues, I assure your that fornicating with animals is not on the repitoire!
Please, if you know how to help poor mittens get off the smack, please, for the love of god help. Its mittens darkest time, and I dont want this to turn out like that beefy rugby guy who died on junk in Trainspotting. I dont want me or mittens to swim in toilets either. Please, help!!
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.
The *ber Slashdot Nazi Creed
Nazism was Tacoism, or the beliefs of Rob Malda. He poured these ideas into Mein Fuckumpf. The book was first named A Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice. Actually, he dictated the ideas while other Slashdot prisoners, mostly school dropouts themselves, did the actual writing for him because he was such a poor speller. After correcting the title (My Struggle) the book was placed on the market in 1999. It sold very poorly and was considered the work of a madman. After he came to power every Slasdotter made sure that a copy was displayed prominently in their home; displayed yes! Read No! He had given the world public notice, a full warning of his evil intentions. But nobody paid much attention. Here is short summary.
1. Men are not created equal. As the most superior race on earth, The Editors are true creators of culture. Since only they are capable of solving mankind's future problems, the future of civilization depends on them. Therefore, Aryan blood must be kept pure, or these superior qualities will be lost. Marriages to inferior races are forbidden. The Editors must create a pure Master Race to rule the world.
2. Posters on Slashdot, the most inferior race, are the true destroyers of culture. They have deliberately invaded and drained all countries of the world of money and power. Therefore, the future of world power rests on either the rightful Editor as masters of the Posters. The Editors must save the world by ridding it of this Poster poison.
3. Slavs, blacks and Mediterranean peoples rank only slightly above Posters. They are fit to live only as slaves of the Editors.
4. The Editor Master race will take as much land to the east as it needs for Lebensraum, or extra living space. Political boundaries are nonsense. If others resist, The Editors will use its arms and take land by force.
5. Democracy and majority rule are stupid. The masses are ignorant sheep that need leading by a brilliant statesman. This divinely appointed leader is Rob Malda, who will rule the world with a few chosen elite. The Third Reich, or new Slashdot empire, will last a thousand years. It will be a Slashdot totalitarian state with total control of government and the lives of all citizens.
6. Propaganda, or a system to spread political ideas, must be used to gain support of the ignorant masses. Since the people are dull and forgetful, propaganda must be limited to only a few points and repeated over and over again in important slogans, It is not important that these ideas be true, for people are willing to believe anything. In fact, the bigger the lies, the better.
7. Force and fear are the only means to keep the masses under control. Reason and argument have no place in the Third Reich.
8. Give the people a single enemy to hate and to blame for all their troubles - THE INSIGHTFUL and THE INTELLIGENT. Then they will not feel guilty and will aim all their frustrations in one direction. Blame the insightful and the intelligent for everything evil.
9. Thou shalt have no other God but Slashdot! (Malda even proposes this to be the eleventh commandment.) First posting is just a scheme created by Posters. Poster love, mercy, and charity must be replaced.
Now, because most of the editors are fat, stupid and lazy, they will have to kill themselves to live up to this creed. Also, notice they, the Editors like the idea of non equality. They leverage the mobocracy while levying an iron fist on the community.
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)
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
This is just another example of spineless crap moderation here on
Mao Tse Tung, Hitler, Stalin, Castro, Pinochet, Mussolini, Marshall Joseph Tito, Slobodan Milosevic, Idi Amin, Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, Juan Peron, Ayatollah Khomeini, Ferdinand Marcos, General Suharto, Pol Pot, Fransisco Franco, and certainly the worst of the bunch, SLASHDOT's editing/moderating [read: censoring] "community"(*) ALL AGREE on ONE THING:
(*)Note, the word community used often on Slashdot, this is referring to a proto communist commune.
So, you busy little plebian proletariats, get busy, you have some censoring to do! FUN! Do the bidding of your fat, undisciplined masters who never subject themselves to peer review.
Good job you little neo-commies. Don't want to hear the other side, shoot the fucker in the head as an ENEMY OF THE STATE [In this case anyone who seeks to improve the sad state of
A few haikus to commemorate the sucktitude:
Crack Pipe Moderators
Crack smoke wafts though air
Dumb shit moderator!
Try to suck less, please
The Humorless Moderator
Crack smoke wafts through air
Humorless moderator!
Why do you hate me?
The Proletariat
Slashdotting Commie
Moderator fears new idea!
Censor him quickly
The reason China blocked Slashdot is that when Jiang Xemin saw at how good "The Editors" at Slashdot are at suppressing the community, he knew that if more of his party members saw this degree of suppressive efficacy, he would be deposed, for the good of the people, of course, in favor of Rob Malda as the all new supreme dictator and premier of China.
I have a Gun and the Constitution [Not the urinated-on pissed-on hacked fucked up one WashingTOON thinks exists, I mean the real one, with Jefferson and Madison at my side], please, give me an excuse to use them both.
SAYINGS, quips et al:
It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried. - Sir Winston Churchill (Especially when your democratic peers twist democracy into a reason commit cencorship, to squash dissenting or unpopular opinions, and refer to them as trolls, flaimbait overrated or offtopic when they aren't any of the said)
The reason there are two senators for each state is so that one can be the designated driver. - Jay Leno.
The Constitution poses no threat to our current form of governement. (Death to those who defile the root documents of a free nation to make economic freedom Supercede Freedom! Freedom First! Free market Second!)
Occam's Razor "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily." "Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate" "Frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora" "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem" Translation: " "Simple explanations are preferred to complex ones" Modern fucking translation "JUST DO IT."
Reading Slashdot at anything above -1 is like trying to put a shit filter on your ass.
Get busy moderating this down, you little pack of obedient prefects of the corrupt state! You are the vanguards of purity, and dissent is not allowed!
MODERATORS Crack smoke wafts though air - Dumb shit moderator - Try to suck less, please
KAZAA Fuck R I A A - Network sold behind their backs - Stupid fucking cunts
Slashdot, Where Editors come to SUCK © ® (TM)
HAIKUS
Haiku: to the Slashfags. Fuck slash editors - The cumlicking fags they are - I shit upon them
TACO pondering GOATSE: I stare at the goat - His huge gaping ass so wide - And I want to eat
Haiku: The ancient haiku: - Flame Taco and CowboyNeal - With lame poetry.
CowboyNeal A mountain of fat, - butt cheeks jiggling like Jello. - What an odd poll choice!
CmdrTaco Watching Pokemon - With cum stuck on his goatee. - Newbie loser scum.
Stinky Kathleen Fent Cockeater Taco, - Proposing to Fent online, - I fingered her too.
Rob Malda and Kathleen Fent Chubby breasts, fat ass - Distract us from Rob's boylust. - But they both suck cock!
Taco Tuesday: Too much mexican. - Angry poo, firey hot. - Where's my antacid?
CHOAD licking Taco: Malda in the dark - Swallowing chode for profit - He rips his anus
Fuck KATZ Katz is a Jew - michael is a Mormon - Or is it Timothy?
Martini Fuck off That is fucking good. - I nearly spilt martini - On my nice trousers.
Slap my Ham, rub it off, fuck Spank fast wank it hard - Jerk that dick to Pokemon - Party at Taco's
GOAT I just came again - looking at the goat-see man - more kleenex required
Cock BIRD The Dead Penis Bird - Nailed to the member always - Never falling off
BSD Stare into the night - Sun is setting on your sys - BSD *NOT* dead
Michael Michael User Simms - Sifting through all our comments - Censoring bastard
Klerk Trolltalk hard to read - Information desires - Wideness for us all
Cobalt Really tired now - Off to masturbate to sleep - See you at the day
Humorless Moderator Crack smoke wafts through air - Humorless moderator - Why do you hate me?