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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.
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!
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?
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.
> 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.
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 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
Not when someones already done it for you!!w .nytimes.com/pages/world/index.html
http://www.majcher.com/nytview.html?url=http://ww
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.
But yet... It was Alan Shepard that hit the moon-drive. Not to get off-topic. Please ignore. Anal retentive compulsions peaking... -that which does not kill me makes me stranger-
hmm
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.
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?"
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slashdot should have public signup account @ nytimes :)
"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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
The original Physics world Article is at
http://physicsweb.org/article/world/15/9/2
Maybe because the other news services ain't work doodlie-squat? I've yet to find a good, in-depth article on any other site. They usually reduce content to about a dozen lines.
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.
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.
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)
Scientology [comma] UFOs
Scientology and UFOs don't count as two seperate items, Scientology is a UFO cult. One item. If you weren't aware of that may I point you to Xenu.net or try this google search.
Scientologists are constantly battling to keep OT III a secret. Their main weapon is to try and get it pulled off the web for violating their copyright on it. That obviously only works if OT III is a real Church of Scientology (CoS) document.
Supposedly learning the contents of OT III is "dangerous" unless you have had several years of special (and expensive) CoS training. Oh, it's dangerous alright, but dangerous to CoS because no one in their right mind would join a UFO cult if they knew what it said. All the "Dianetics" stuff is just bait. They keep all the freeky stuff top secret during the early levels.
To summarize, OT III says that 75 million years ago the Galactic Federation had an overpopulation problem so President Xenu rounded up a few billion citizens, murdered them, froze them, flew them to earth, dumped them in volcanoes, set off an H-bomb in each volcano, THEN he brainwashed them. (I don't know about you, but I would have maybe brainwashed them before killing them?) Now each of us is infested by hundreds of spirits of theses nukes aliens and we are under the control of their brainwashing. Oh, and I almost forgot, the Earth? Well the real name for the Earth is Teegeeack.
Now, since "we" are all mind-controlled by these aliens (like some bad SciFi flick), it is morally right and acceptable to manipulate, lie, cheat, steal, slander, or even kill anyone who has not been cleansed by CoS training. Oh joy!
you have quite an imagination sir!
Err, compared to the above, no. My imagination doesn't even come close.
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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._ ____
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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.....
My question (echoed by others, unanswered by you) is, why not put fake information into the NYT login? That's what I did about a year ago. No real information in there at all, and I don't have to go about asking others to work around the NYT's system on my behalf. I did it myself, once, and haven't had to think about it since (except for the occasional cookie wipeout, requiring me to login again).
Perhaps they may be tracking where else I've gone, although I've never quite understood how that would work, since my browser won't let sites access a cookie unless that cookie was written by that site to begin with. Maybe you need a new browser?
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
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)
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.