Top Ten Physics Experiments Of All Times 296
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.
physics (Score:2, Funny)
Re:physics (Score:3, Funny)
Re:physics (Score:3, Interesting)
It's also quite obvious that you've never tried to strap something to a cat.
Re:physics (Score:4, Funny)
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.
What about Trinity? or: Don't try this at home (Score:2, Insightful)
Hopefully not duplicatable in a garage.
Re:What about Trinity? or: Don't try this at home (Score:3, Informative)
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.
NYT article without registering (Score:5, Informative)
Re:NYT article without registering (Score:2)
Re:Why NYTimes? (Score:2)
Didn't we have a poll about this? (Score:2)
I VOTE FOR THIS ONE.... (Score:5, Funny)
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!
Re:I VOTE FOR THIS ONE.... (Score:2)
Re:I VOTE FOR THIS ONE.... (Score:2)
What about the Michaelson-Morley experiment? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: What about the Michaelson-Morley experiment? (Score:2)
> I find it astonishing that the Michaelson-Morley experiment, which was the basis for Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity didn't make the top ten list.
Yeah, M/M is always the first thing that comes to mind when the subject of "classic experiment" comes up.
Re:What about the Michaelson-Morley experiment? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What about the Michaelson-Morley experiment? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:What about the Michaelson-Morley experiment? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What about the Michaelson-Morley experiment? (Score:2)
Thompson, of course, discovered the electron.
Good suggestions! (Score:2)
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...
Consider the audience (Score:4, Insightful)
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:What about the Michaelson-Morley experiment? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's right between Chauvenet, and - wait for it - Michaelson halls.
Re:What about the Michaelson-Morley experiment? (Score:2)
Actually, Einstein claimed that he was unaware of the Michaelson-Morely result when he formulated Special Relativity. He was aware of the constant speed of light predicted by Maxwell's equations though.
Re:What about the Michaelson-Morley experiment? (Score:4, Insightful)
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:What about the Michaelson-Morley experiment? (Score:2)
I get despressed about the pseudo-sciences where experiments aren't repeated because someone else has done it already - what happened to verification? And as you say, a negative result can be every bit as important as a positive.
Just think how much money would have been wasted if Fleishman & Pons had been taken at face value..... (yes, this is irony)
Re:What about the Michaelson-Morley experiment? (Score:2)
It wasn't about the "most influential" experiments (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What about the Michaelson-Morley experiment? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 ).
With my today's morning commute (Score:4, Informative)
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!*
Re:With my today's morning commute (Score:2)
Re:With my today's morning commute (Score:2)
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...
Re:With my today's morning commute (Score:2)
Re:With my today's morning commute (Score:2)
Re:With my today's morning commute (Score:2)
Re:With my today's morning commute (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re:With my today's morning commute (Score:2)
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.
11th greatest experiment... (Score:5, Funny)
Conducted in 7th grade; proved that farts are flammable.
Michelson-Morley???? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
My favourite experiment (Score:2, Funny)
Re:My favourite experiment (Score:2)
This evenings experiment is well underway I see!
And now you've left me with the mental image of morphing-pig-toilet-thing...thanks.
I choose to disagree (Score:2, Funny)
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?
They forgot one helluva important one... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:They forgot one helluva important one... (Score:2)
Google News (Score:2)
Never mind, usenet went to the dogs a long time ago..
Thought experiments vs experiments (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Thought experiments vs experiments (Score:2)
Gallileo did do experiments rolling cannonballs down inclined planes, which are what is being rated.
Young did get interference fringes by putting a small obstacle in the path of a light-beam.
Re:Thought experiments vs experiments (Score:2, Interesting)
OK, I read the article again.
Even more interesting, the ones I picked out as gedanken experiments were ranked 1 and 2.
The passage I remembered from Galileo's Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences has been thoughtfully excerpted and placed online [virginia.edu].
Summary of the article (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Summary of the article (Score:2)
Aristotle botched more than just physics... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Aristotle botched more than just physics... (Score:2)
This sounds an awful lot like Anne Elk's theory about the Brontosaurus, if you ask me.
Re:Summary of the article (Score:5, Informative)
Proving that *Aristotle* was an idiot? Aristotle is widely known as a person who was probably among the most intelligent humans ever to have lived.
Aristotle taught Alexander the Great. His studies on animals laid the foundation for the biological sciences and weren't superceded until two THOUSAND years after his death.
Aristotle made significant contributions to logic (He and Plato founded the basic principals of logic, such as some of the rules of inference), physics, astronomy, meteorology, zoology, metaphysics, theology, psychology, political science, economics, ethics, rhetoric, and poetics However, still more astounding is the fact that the majority of these subjects did not exist as such before him, so that he would have been the first to conceive of and establish them, as systematic disciplines.
His writings, some of which you should recognize as some of the most influential documents ever written, include:
On logic
Categories
On Interpretation
Prior Analytics
Posterior Analytics
Topics
Sophistical Refutations
On physics
Physics
On The Heavens
On Generation and Corruption
On psychology and natural history
On The Soul
On The Parts Of Animals
On The Motion Of Animals
On The History Of Animals
On The Gait Of Animals
On The Generation Of Animals
On ethics
Nicomachean Ethics
Eudemian Ethics
Magna Moralia
Politics
Rhetoric
Poetics
General investigation of the things
Metaphysics
Other works
Meteorology
On Dreams
On Longevity and Shortness Of Life
On Memory and Reminiscence
On Prophesying by Dreams
On Sense and The Sensible
On Sleep and Sleeplessness
On Youth and Old Age, On Life And Death, On Breathing
This person contributed more and to more areas than any other who has ever lived. That some of his sciences were found to be incorrect does not change this, particularly when you consider that he laid the foundation of the principal ideas of what we call physics more than two thousand years before his physics were superceded. Calling this man a moron is like calling Linux Torvalds a newbie programmer, or Windows 95 a reliable server operating system. In fact, I cannot think of anything more wrong than to use "Aristotle" and "idiot" in the same sentence without a "not". Name one person who has done even close to as much for human knowledge and understanding.
Re:Summary of the article (Score:5, Funny)
Article summary: Three out of ten great scientists rose to prominence by proving Aristotle was an idiot +5 funny
is pure gold
(How do I know it's pure gold? Well, I was taking a bath and some of the water spilled over the side...)
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Re:Summary of the article (Score:2)
Re:Summary of the article (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Aristotle's common sense wasn't. (Score:3, Flamebait)
This attitude is still found today in much of the social sciences and humanities, hence their uselessness
Essentially, he passed his opinion off as fact and the western world bought it.
To this date, much of sociology is an argument of opinions the levi-straussites against the marxists against the flavour-of-the-day-theory. Not once does it occur to them to set up experiments to start discriminating between the different theories.
Re:Aristotle's common sense wasn't. (Score:4, Insightful)
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. (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Mostly True (Score:2)
Correct. Social scientist are not even trying to set up experiments. How hard can it be to create, say, a simulated "survivor" or "big brother" like situation (meaning a controlled environment with willing volunteers) and study sociological behaviour of the parties involved? How hard can it be to tape people in day to day situations and see how they interact?
In fact, there is a famous couple at the University of Washington doing just this, and (a) it was easy to set the experiment and (b) the results obtained from the experiments have been turned into amazingly accurate predictor of failure of marriage for any given observed couple.
Re:Summary of the article (Score:3, Insightful)
Aristotle == Idiot (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Reductionist history (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Reductionist history (Score:2, Insightful)
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
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 (Score:2, Insightful)
Note that the NY Times is just telling us what's been published elsewhere. Physicists themselves voted on the experiments.
Re:Reductionist history (Score:5, Informative)
www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/1921/index.html
www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/1921/press.html
Re:Reductionist history (Score:2)
The theoretical physics bit is though to refer to his work on relativity and Brownian motion.
The reason why the award was couched in such vague terms was that, at the time, no one was sure what to make of the theory - it stood in splendid isolation: difficult to do experiments on, and difficult to integrate with the rest of physics (some things don't change). And as it was an unusual theory nobody was really sure of it's importance. E=mc^2 was yet to be demonstrated (in the shape of a mushroom cloud) and drive home exactly what its importance was.
So the Nobel prize committee hedged.
The Cavendish experiment (Score:2)
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.
Do good links (Score:3, Interesting)
PLEASE! When you link to a NYT article, link to the anonymizer page for it instead.
Re:Do good links (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Do good links (Score:2)
Or lie to them and mess up their demographics.
Tell them you're the exact opposite of what you are... Tell them you're an unemployed janitor making 20 million a year. Tell them you're from Afghanistan. (I'd love to see what the marketers do with the unemployed millionaire Afghani janitor).
Re:Do good links (Score:2)
Re:You're all over the place (Score:2)
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 [xenu.net] or try this google search [google.com].
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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Lightweight earth. (Score:2, Insightful)
Which is around 6 tons. Perhaps 6.0 x 10^24 kilograms would be a little closer...
Andrew
New Info Explains Galileo's Brilliance (Score:5, Funny)
People who have the most menial, boring jobs have the most time to intimately study commonly-ignored things like gravity.
Re:New Info Explains Galileo's Brilliance (Score:2)
I recall in grad school in the mid-80s sitting in the library pouring over scientific journal volumes from the 50s 60s and even 70s. The science seemed more elegant and relevant back then. Today scientific focus is so narrow but scientific production in terms of publication is greater than ever before.
There are a lot of papers being published on irrelevant minutia that are filling the library shelves. Current scientific research may be technically correct but that just doesn't make it good science.
Millikan's oil drop and fraud (Score:2, Interesting)
(It seems Millikan had many other strikes against him. The question of fraud is brought up on page 3.)
Smoke extraction (Score:4, Funny)
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.
They forgot the best one: (Score:2, Funny)
Innocent scientist comes to /. and gets trolled (Score:2)
Hmmmm - he doesn't get to the cinema much does he?
Groan. At least TWO ERRORS in the article. (Score:5, Informative)
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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and they completely missed the point ... (Score:2, Insightful)
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:Groan. At least TWO ERRORS in the article. (Score:2)
Actually, you're both wrong. He used an alpha particle source to ionize the air in the chamber, which then ionized the drops of oil.
Still wrong (Score:2)
My suggestion for "top ten" (Score:2, Funny)
Enough said.
wrong title.... (Score:2)
Chronological order (Score:3, Funny)
How can you disagree with the order if it is chronological order?
Oh, I forgot that time is relative...
History of science museum at Firenze(Florence) (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd have to add ... (Score:2)
twinkie project (Score:2)
http://www.twinkiesproject.com/
Some things never change (Score:2)
500 years and geeks still have not learned to stop upsetting PHB's via reality.
I like how the "but he has demonstrated..." is given more emphasis than the first part.
Re:Some things never change (Score:2)
[Thomas Young's] medical career was not particularly successful, and his favourite maxim that a medical diagnosis is only a balance of probabilities was not appreciated by his patients, who looked for certainty in return for their fee.
I am fascinated by good scientists who bump into social walls for some reason. Perhaps it just reminds me of the workplace.
(From http://www.maths.tcd.ie/pub/HistMath/People/Napol
My Nomination (Score:2)
Kevin Costner's demonstration of the attraction of white trash to ridiculous attractions. Know better as the "If you build it they will come" hypothesis
I have only this to say: (Score:2)
Re:no more ny times posts (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.majcher.com/nytview.html?url=http://ww
Re:no more ny times posts (Score:2, Informative)
http://physicsweb.org/article/world/15/9/2 [physicsweb.org]
Re:My favourite physics experiment... (Score:5, Funny)
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...
Ob Douglas Adams quote (Score:2, Funny)
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 [hiddessen.de], chapter 1 (italics mine)
Re:It said "Science's 10 Most Beautiful Experiment (Score:2)
2002-09-24 18:57:39 10 Most Beautiful Experiments (articles,science) (rejected)
Re:It said "Science's 10 Most Beautiful Experiment (Score:2)
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 [drexel.edu] 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 [manchesteronline.co.uk] looked like?