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Tuesday, September 24, 2002   
Now here's a beauty contest I can get behind!

Here They Are, Science's 10 Most Beautiful Experiments...

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.

  1. Eratosthenes' measurement of the Earth's circumference
  2. Galileo's experiment on falling objects
  3. Galileo's experiments with rolling balls down inclined planes
  4. Newton's decomposition of sunlight with a prism
  5. Cavendish's torsion-bar experiment
  6. Young's light-interference experiment
  7. Foucault's pendulum
  8. Millikan's oil-drop experiment
  9. Rutherford's discovery of the nucleus
  10. Young's double-slit experiment applied to the interference of single electrons

I have to admit that I was less than familiar with 2 of these. How about you? You can read up on them in the New York Times article.

12:19:18 AM      


© Copyright 2002 Pascale Soleil.
Last updated: 10/7/02; 3:45:12 PM.
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