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.

What about Trinity? or: Don't try this at home

[opencity]

A physics experiment on a grand scale and ... uh ... earth shattering.

Hopefully not duplicatable in a garage.

Michelson-Morley????

[RichardtheSmith]

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.

Re:What about the Michaelson-Morley experiment?

[Florian H.]

One point speaking against including MM is that it was not really relevant to Einstein's work, he tried to solve theoretical inconsistencies between mechanics and electrodynamics.

Reductionist history

[panurge]

The NYT is guilty of trying to reduce physics to the "one great man" syndrome - the idea that the team leader is everything and everyone else is nothing. Rutherford's unnamed assistants were no less than Geiger and Marsden, major physicists in their own right, and the equation of scattering from the nucleus was never thought up by Rutherford - he gave the problem to a mathematician, according to Cambridge legend without telling what the results were needed for so the mathematician wouldn't claim part of the credit.

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.

Lightweight earth.

[gafferted]

The NYT writes: Cavendish had weighed [the earth]: 6.0 x 1024 kilograms

Which is around 6 tons. Perhaps 6.0 x 10^24 kilograms would be a little closer...

Andrew

Re:What about the Michaelson-Morley experiment?

[pmc]

Not really - MM experiment completely destroyed the worldview at the time. Depending on you criteria this has to be one of the top ten.

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.

Aristotle botched more than just physics...

[Dahamma]

Aristotle "talked out of his ass" in a LOT of different fields. This is by far my FAVORITE single Aristotle quote... (From Poetics, Part VII)

Now a whole is that which has beginning, middle, and end. A beginning is that which is not itself necessarily after anything else, and which has naturally something else after it; an end is that which is naturally after something itself either as its necessary or usual consequent, and with nothing else after it; and a middle, that which is by nature after one thing and also has another after it.

Re:Reductionist history

[BaShildy]

Its not just the NYT; its journalism in general. It is much easier to report the story as a miracle scientist who breaks new ground (re: Dean Kamen), than a company of hundreds uses established research from many sources, and after years of testing and development come up with a prototype that may or may not have an impact on modern travel.

This extends to all careers. I'm a game developer, and it's very common to see big names credited with an entire project. It's impossible for 1 man to create most types of modern games. Instead of giving credit to the entire team, it's easier to report that a "Designer" thought of a great idea that is selling millions instead of mentioning the joint effort by the programmers, artists, testers, etc. Warren Spector joked about this on an article, and was quoted as Warren Spector - Maker of Deus Ex :) Even recently Slashdot reported on Spirited Away [slashdot.org] often referring it to as Miyazaki's film. Did Miyazaki have a significant affect on the film? Obviously; But 99% of the film was drawn by other team members. Most likely you will never hear their names.

Journalism will never tell you the full behind the scenes on a large project. To fully understand the process of science, film, or even game development, you have to work in it. On top of that, most of the public either doesn't care, or won't believe the significant team effort that goes into a big project. I bet you the majority of people believe Bill Gates programs most if not all of windows.

If anybody would read 2nd paragraph of the article

[Adaere]

"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.

Re:Summary of the article

[Anonymous Coward]

Did he write On Jokes?

if so, perhaps you should read it.

and they completely missed the point ...

[Peter Greenwood]

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.

Re:Summary of the article

[Anonymous Coward]

It is true that the mass of works attributed to Aristotle is, while not always correct, truely ground-breaking. Unfortunately it is not clear if Aristotle alone wrote them, or if his students continued to contribute after his death, but under his name.

In any case we can thank the Arab world for preserving these great works for humanity, while the only thing western Europe was discovering and preserving was the depths of human depravity.

Re:What about the Michaelson-Morley experiment?

[The Fun Guy]

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.

Re:Do good links

[Alsee]

you could have registered, stored the cookie and never needed to think about registering ever again in less time than it took you to post that comment.

True, and Rosa Parks could have saved herself a lot of time and trouble if she just sat in the back of the bus. A costly war was averted by simply letting Hitler have Poland. I won't get sued by the Church of Scientology if I don't tell anyone that it's really a dangerous UFO cult. I won't have trouble viewing defective websites if I just use Internet Explorer in low security mode with scripting and cookies enabled. And I'll gain some security if I give up essential freedoms.

Sure, subverting NY Times registration is a small protest, but as Churchill once said, it is the sort of thing up with which I will not put.

-

Re:Summary of the article

[shren]

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.

Aristotle's common sense wasn't.

[budalite]

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.

It wasn't about the "most influential" experiments

[gosand]

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.

Consider the audience

[Wind_Walker]

The New York Times wasn't writing for us Physicists - they were writing for the average Joe Schmoe who barely knows what an electron is, let alone the fundamentals of superconductivity or Maxwell's theory. The NYT list is a list of old experiments (I don't think any of them were after 1900 or so) because they're easily understood by the masses and easily explained by a journalist who doesn't fully comprehend it, either.

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.

Re:Summary of the article

[operagost]

The fact that he stated that for an object rolling down an inclined plane d=tv (i.e., didn't accelerate), while it can be disproven by simple everyday observation, shows his internal combustion engine wasn't firing on all the cylinders. Or he was lazy.

Re:What about the Michaelson-Morley experiment?

[siphoncolder]

There were lots of physics experiments that changed the world in terribly significant ways. Personally, I would have included the displacement test/experiment from Archimedes, because it's such a great story - however, it doesn't rank quite THAT elegantly above the experiements mentioned in the article.

This article asks for the most BEAUTIFUL experiments, not their impact on the world. These experiments most certainly did have a large impact, but what sets them apart from other experiments is how simply they were done (the article even states as much before you even get into the experiments).

I can understand your confusion - /. itself can be guilty of "Broken Telephone" news coverage, too. That, or the editors have no appreciation of beauty (the idea or the word that's missing in the headline =P ).

Re:Aristotle's common sense wasn't.

[King Babar]

I am not aware that he actually performed a single experiment. Aristotle regarded experimentation 'beneath right thinkers'.

This attitude is still found today in much of the social sciences and humanities, hence their uselessness.

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.

Re:Aristotle's common sense wasn't.

[Alomex]

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 the standard cop-out that social scientists use: we would like to do experiments, is just that is too difficult.

The same could be said about astronomy or economics, yet those disciplines have found a (limited) way to perform experiments. For many years economists used the same cop-out: it is impossible to experiment with economies. Well it turns out that running simulated games with $10 prices amongst undergrad students are amazingly good predictors of what real economic players would do in similar but much larger situations. So their lame excuse was just that, a lame excuse.

In fact, recently a foundation was established with the aim of selecting scientifically valid data points for use in the social sciences. The scientific panel is making good progress and projected, IIRC ten thousand such scientifically validated studies within a year or so ... The idea is to provide the experimental basis to start discriminating between theories. As you can imagine, the effort came through a wealthy donor from outside the social sciences.