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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.
You take a piece of buttered bread and strap it to a cat (buttered side up). Then you drop the cat from a few feet up. Since buttered bread always lands buttered side down and a cat always lands on its feet, the cat will hover a foot or so off the ground spinning perpetually.
For all the lamers who don't want to register, Google News is your friend.
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!*
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.
Eventually the butter would dry up, leaving the toast bare.
It's also quite obvious that you've never tried to strap something to a cat.
--
pants ahoy
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.
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.
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
People who have the most menial, boring jobs have the most time to intimately study commonly-ignored things like gravity.
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.
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.
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
According to Terry Pratchett (can't remember which book offhand), experiments to transmit messages by careful torturing of a small king have so far been unsuccessful, but the researchers are still hopeful...
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!
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 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.
My professor wondered why a cat always lands right side up.
He took a cat and video taped it falling.
He looked at the footage and noticed that the cat's tail was spinning in the opposite direction - to conserve angular momentum.
So he decided to tape the cat's tail down and rerun the experiment.
All this while running the video camera.
The cat was sick of experiments and violently lashed out at him.
All on tape.
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