The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments by George Johnson (PDF)

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A dazzling, irresistible collection of the ten most groundbreaking and beautiful experiments in scientific history. With the attention to detail of a historian and the storytelling ability of a novelist, New York Times science writer George Johnson celebrates these groundbreaking experiments and re-creates a time when the world seemed filled with mysterious forces and scientists were in awe of light, electricity, and the human body. Here, we see Galileo staring down gravity, Newton breaking apart light, and Pavlov studying his now famous dogs. This is science in its most creative, hands-on form, when ingenuity of the mind is the most useful tool in the lab and the rewards of a well-considered experiment are on exquisite display.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Johnson’s lively book nicely evokes the lost world of the tabletop experiment. . . . His vision is broad . . . [and] finds beauty throughout science.”—The New York Times Book Review “A page turner that documents moments of genius from Galileo to Millikan.”—The Washington Post“As elegant as the experiments it describes.”—The Wall Street Journal “Johnson’s . . . crystalline prose is like the pull of gravity . . . an irresistible force.”—Scientific American “As a science journalist, Mr. Johnson is a seasoned translator of technical jargon. He also has a sharp eye for human plot, both in and out of the laboratory . . . a certain spirit of wonder breathes through Mr. Johnson’s chapters.”—The New York Sun“Delightful, succinct, elegant.” —Roger Penrose“Absorbing . . .”—Discover “Johnson’s book is as elegant as the experiments he features . . . . The writing here is lively, mixing bits of biography with the experiments themselves, offering the human element that explains the scientists’ motivation as well as the science. Johnson shares personal anecdotes as well as theory in an engaging, compelling style. The result is a little gem of a book, enjoyable to read both as history and science.”—Bookpage“Johnson deftly relates the circumstances and eccentricities integral to the findings behind science’s most seminal experiments.”—Seed Magazine“Johnson engagingly dramatizes his stories with failure-crowned-by-success narratives, adding biographical sparks . . . Johnson exerts classic appeal to science readers: presenting the lone genius making a great discovery. Good to go in any library.”—Booklist“Concise, evocative . . . pays wonderful homage to the science and scientists that helped create the modern world.”—Publisher’s Weekly“George Johnson knows his stuff, and his stuff is science.”—The Santa Fe New Mexican“George Johnson’s The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments makes its point as elegantly as the experiments it describes.”—Wall Street Journal“Unusual and engaging . . . unfussy, jargon-free . . . Johnson is an experienced science writer with a knack for making biology and physics clear, and for finding the humanizing details in this world.”—Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune“[An] entertaining physics text by a skilled science writer.”—Jeffrey Bairstow, In My View About the Author George Johnson writes regularly about science for The New York Times. He has also written for National Geographic, Slate, Discover, Scientific American, Wired, and The Atlantic, and his work has been included in The Best American Science Writing. A former Alicia Patterson fellow, he has received awards from PEN and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and his books were twice finalists for the Royal Society’s book prize. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. chapter 1 Galileo The Way Things Really Move Galileo Galilei, by Ottavio Leoni It is very unpleasant and annoying to see men, who claim to be peers of anyone in a certain field of study, take for granted certain conclusions which later are quickly and easily shown by another to be false. —Salviati, in Galileo, Two New Sciences When you throw a rock, catch a ball, or jump just hard enough to clear a hurdle, the older, unconscious part of the brain, the cerebellum, reveals an effortless grasp of the fundamental laws of motion. Force equals mass times acceleration. Every action results in an equal and opposite reaction. But this ingrained physics is sealed off from the newer, upper brain-the cerebrum, seat of intelligence and self-awareness. One can leap as gracefully as a cat but be just as powerless to explain the inverse square law of gravity. Aristotle, in the fourth century BC, made the first ambitious attempt to articulate the rules of motion. An object falls in proportion to its weight-the heavier a rock, the sooner it will reach the ground. For other kinds of movement (pushing a book across a table or a plow across a field), a force must be constantly applied. The harder you push, the faster the object will go. Stop pushing and it will come to a halt. It all sounds eminently sensible and obvious and, of course, is exactly wrong. What if you place the book on a sheet of ice and give it a gentle shove? It will keep moving long after the impetus is removed. (Asked why an arrow keeps going after it leaves the bowstring, the Aristotelians said that it was pushed along by the incoming rush of air.) Now we know that something set in motion stays in motion until stopped by something else, or worn down by friction. And a one-pound weight and a five-pound weight, dropped at the same moment, will fall side by side to the ground. Galileo showed it was so. It’s entirely predictable that the great debunker of Aristotle-celebrated in a play by Bertolt Brecht, an opera by Philip Glass, and a pop song by the Indigo Girls-would come in for his own debunking. It is doubtful, historians tell us, that Galileo dropped two weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Nor do they believe that he hit on his insight about pendulums-that each swing is of equal duration-while watching a certain chandelier in the cathedral of Pisa and timing it with his heartbeat. His credentials as a cosmologist have also dimmed under scrutiny. Galileo was the most eloquent advocate of Copernicus’s sun-centered solar system-his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems is the first great piece of popular science writing-but he never accepted Kepler’s crucial insight: that the planets move in ellipses. The orbits, Galileo assumed, had to be perfect circles. Here he was following Aristotle, who proclaimed that while motion on Earth (in the “sublunar” realm) must have a beginning and an end, celestial motion is necessarily circular. For that to be true and match what was happening in the sky, the planets would have to move not just in circles but in circles within circles-the same old epicycles that had weighed down Ptolemy’s geocentric universe. Galileo brushed off the problem. Most disappointing of all, he probably did not, as legend has it, follow his forced apology to the Inquisitors of Rome by muttering under his breath, Eppur si muove, “And yet it moves.” He was no martyr. Knowing he had been beaten, he retired to the solitude of Arcetri to lick his wounds. Galileo’s strongest claim to greatness lies in work he did long before his troubles with the Vatican. He was studying nothing so grand as stars or planets but the movement of simple, mundane objects-a subject far more perplexing than anyone had imagined. Whether or not the research actually began at the Tower of Pisa hardly matters. He described a similar experiment in his other masterpiece, Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences, completed during his final years of exile. Like the earlier work it is cast as a long conversation among three Italian noblemen-Salviati, Sagredo, and Simplicio-who are try¬ing to understand how the world works. Salviati is the stand-in for Galileo, and on the first day of the gathering he insists that, dropped simultaneously, a cannonball weighing 100 pounds and a musket ball weighing 1 pound will hit the ground at almost the same time. In an experiment, he concedes, the heavier one did in fact land “two finger-breadths” sooner, but Salviati recognized that other factors, like air resistance, muddied the results. The important point was that the impacts were almost in unison: when the cannonball hit the ground, the musket ball had not traveled just the distance-a single cubit-as common sense would have predicted. “Now you would not hide behind these two fingers the ninety-nine cubits of Aristotle,” he chided,“nor would you mention my small error and at the same time pass over in silence his very large one.” All other things being equal, the speed at which an object falls is independent of its weight. A harder question was what happened between the time a ball was released and the time it struck the ground. It would pick up speed along the way-everybody knew that. But how? Was there a large spurt of motion at the beginning, or a lot of little spurts continuing all the way down? With nothing like time-lapse photography or electronic sensors to clock a falling body, all you could do was speculate. What Galileo needed was an equivalent experiment, one in which the fall would be slower and easier to observe: a ball rolling down a smooth, gentle plane. What was true for its motion should be true for a steeper incline-and for the steep¬est: straight down. He had found a way to ask the question. The year was probably 1604. Three decades later he, or rather Salviati, described the thrust of the experiment: A piece of wooden moulding or scantling, about 12 cubits long, half a cubit wide, and three finger-breadths thick, was taken. On its edge was cut a channel a little more than one finger in breadth. Having made this groove very straight, smooth, and polished, and having lined it with parchment, also as smooth and polished as possible, we rolled along it a hard, smooth, and very round bronze ball. A scantling is a piece of wood, and a Florentine cubit was twenty inches, so we can imagine Galileo with a twenty-foot long board, ten inches wide, propping it up at an angle. Having placed this board in a sloping position, by lifting one end some one or two cubits above the other, we rolled the ball, as I was just saying, along the channel, noting, in a manner presently to be described, the time required to make the descent. We repeated this experiment more than once in order to measure the time with an accuracy such that the deviation between two observations never exceeded one-tenth of a pulse-beat. Once they had perfected the technique, Salviati went on to explain, they timed how long it took the ball to traverse one-fourth of the track, then two-thirds, then three-fourths. They repeated the experiment with the board set at different slopes-100 measurements in all. These were taken with a simple device called a water clock, essentially an hourglass that parcels out seconds with liquid instead of sand: We employed a large vessel of water placed in an elevated position. To the bottom of this vessel was soldered a pipe of small diameter giving a thin jet of water, which we collected in a small glass during the time of each descent, whether for the whole length of the channel or for a part of its length. The water thus collected was weighed, after each descent, on a very accurate balance. The differences and ratios of these weights gave us the differences and ratios of the times, and this with such accuracy that although the operation was repeated many, many times, there was no appreciable discrepancy in the results. The weight of the water was equivalent to the passage of time. Ingenious. But maybe, some modern historians have concluded, a little too good to be true. Reading Galileo’s words some three centuries later, Alexandre Koyré, a profes¬sor at the Sorbonne, could barely contain his scorn: A bronze ball rolling in a “smooth and polished” wooden groove! A vessel of water with a small hole through which it runs out and which one collects in a small glass in order to weigh it afterwards and thus measure the times of descent…What an accumulation of sources of error and inexactitude! It is obvious that the Galilean experiments are completely worthless. Koyré suspected that there had been no experiment-that Galileo was using an imaginary demonstration with rolling balls as a pedagogical device, an illustration of a law of physics that he had figured out mathematically, through pure deduction, the old-fashioned way. Galileo, it seemed, had been debunked again. Koyré was writing in 1953. Twenty years later Stillman Drake, one of the leading experts on Galilean science, was sleuthing among the manuscripts in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence when he came across some unpublished pages-entries from Galileo’s own notebook. Galileo was something of a pack rat, and when his notebooks were published around the turn of the twentieth century, the editor, Antonio Favaro, had left out some pages that appeared to be no more than scribbles, a mess of calculations and diagrams that didn’t make sense. The pages were apparently out of order, with little clue as to when they had been written or what their author was working on. Drake was researching a new English translation of Two New Sciences. For three months at the beginning of 1972,he sat in Florence going through 160 pages of the seventy-second volume of Galileo’s papers, comparing watermarks and styles of handwriting, restoring the pages to what seemed a sensible order. Among the earliest were what appeared to be data from the experiment of 1604,when Galileo was in Padua. From the jottings, Drake re-created the centuries-old experiment, and with just a little license, we can imagine what was going through Galileo’s mind. He releases the ball at the top of the wooden incline noting that in the first few moments, it travels a distance of 33 punti, or points. (Galileo was using a ruler marked into sixty equal units, and a point, Drake deduced, was just shy of one millimeter.) After an equal amount of time has passed, the ball, picking up speed, covers a total of 130 punti, and by the end of the third interval, 298 punti. Then 526, 824, 1,192, 1,620 . . . faster and faster. These were real data. For the final distance, when the ball would have been moving at top speed, Galileo had originally written 2,123 punti, scratching it out and correcting it to 2,104. By some of his figures, he put a plus or a minus sign, apparently indicating when his measurements seemed high or low. The units of time he was using don’t matter. We might as well call them ticks. The important thing is that each interval be the same: 123456 7 8 ticks (time) 33 130 298 526 824 1,192 1,620 2,104 punti (accumulated distance) At first no pattern leaps forth. With each tick the ball covers more ground, but by what rule? Galileo started playing with the numbers. Maybe the speed increased according to some arithmetical progression. What about alternating odd numbers: 1, 5, 9, 13, 17, 21 …? On the second tick the ball would move five times faster than on the first tick, covering 5 _ 33 or 165 punti. Too high but maybe within the range of experimental error. The distance covered on tick three would be nine times greater: 33 _ 9 = 297 punti. Right on the mark! And on the fourth tick 13 _ 33 = 429.Too low. Then 17 _ 33 = 561, too high. And 21 _ 33 = 693, way too low…. Drake could see on the manuscript page where Galileo scratched out the numbers to try again. On the first tick the ball had covered 33 punti, then 130. What if you divide the numbers? 130/33 = 3.9. The distance had increased almost four times. With the third tick, the increase was 298/33, slightly more than nine times the initial distance. Then 15.9, 25.0, 36.1, 49.1, 63.8. He rounded the numbers and wrote them, using a different ink and pen, in a column: 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64. He had found the key: allowing for a bit of error, the distance covered increased with the square of the time. With a longer board, one could confidently predict that on the next tick the factor would be 81 (92) and then 100, 121, 144, 169…. That Galileo’s numbers were not exact testified to the reality of the experiment. That they were as close as they were testified to his skill as an experimenter. In these calculations the distances are cumulative: by the fourth tick the ball has traversed a total of sixteen times the distance it covered at the end of the first tick. But how far does it travel during each separate interval, between ticks three and four compared with ticks two and three? The answer can be backed out with arithmetic. It is the nature of squares that they are the sums of the odd numbers that precede them: 4 = 1 + 3; 9 = 1 + 3 + 5; 16 = 1 + 3 + 5 + 7. Implicit in the times-square law is that the distances between ticks must increase according to the progression of odd numbers. Galileo’s data show how this works. Tick by tick the ball travels three times the distance, then five times, then seven, then nine. In fact Galileo could have started with the odd-number progression and derived the times-squared relationship. However he did it, the result was a fundamental new law. The steeper the slope, the faster the ball would roll, but always according to the same rule- which would presumably hold if the slope was ninety degrees, straight down. At the other extreme, a slope of zero degrees, there would be no acceleration. Once the ball, traveling down the incline, reached the flat tabletop, it would begin moving at a uniform speed-forever if the plane was infinite and friction didn’t interfere. And if the moving ball reached the edge of the table and dropped off? On the triumphant fourth day of Two New Sciences, Galileo provides the answer: the unhurried horizontal motion and the downwardly accelerated vertical motion combine to yield the familiar parabolic shape of a projectile. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Anyone involved in any scientific discipline should read this book. It is so important to understand the history of scientific exploration and where we fit in today. I have chosen to give descriptions of two of the experiments from this book in hopes to convey the atmosphere of the book. I think it is a really neat way to introduce some of the most important scientific discoveries in history as well as praise the genius it took to discover them.”The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments”, by George Johnson, is a novel written to energize readers about the intricacy and beauty of classic experiments. The author finds it important, in a day in which science has become industrialized and over-run with technology, that his readers are reminded of how some of the greatest discoveries in history came to be. The experiments were simple, often the work of one or two men, yet so elegant and genius that they continue to inspire generation after generation of thinkers. Johnsons begins with Galileo in the 17th century and ends with Robert Millikan in the 20th century, but also recreates many of the experiments himself. Johnson’s experiences with the experimental methods and equipment provide a unique contrast which allows the reader to appreciate the skill the original discoverers must have used.Galileo:We now know that force = mass x acceleration. But Johnson reveals that the laws of motion confused men for centuries. While Aristotle made sensible observations, he had little grasp on the subjects of acceleration, force, friction, air resistance, etc. Galileo disproved Aristotle’s “rules,” but Aristotle is not forgotten because his “rules” laid the foundation upon which Galileo, and many others, built.Before religion burdened his curiosity, Galileo experimented with motion and showed that, in controlled conditions, “the speed at which an object falls is independent of its weight.” But he still wondered why the falling objects gained speed as they dropped. Limitations in photography (they had watercolors) forced him to slow the motion of the drop for observation by erecting a smooth plane for the ball to travel through; during its fall, the ball would trip bells at different points on the track. The bells stood at increments of 1/4, 2/3, and 3/4 of the plane and the balls’ descent to each point was timed (allegedly) by water clock. The measurements were taken again at different slopes of the plane.The water clock worked by drips of water which were weighed after each run of the ball–the more drips of water to fall meant more time had passed and the compared weights gave ratios to the distances the ball traveled during the allotted time. The idea of this experiment was highly scrutinized; some shamed it for its lack of precision while others believed it never actually took place, that Galileo staged it after deducing acceleration mathematically. Stillman Drake, in the early 1970s, pieced together missing pages of Galileo’s experiment which had been discarded as scribbles. Whatever medium had been used to time the ball’s intervals of movement was irrelevant as long as the time was constant, and Galileo’s measurements showed that with each interval, the ball picked up more distance during the same amount of time. Because he noted next to these distances whether they seemed high or low, it is fair to assume Galileo had determined an equation for the increasing speed of the ball. On the manuscript, Galileo had written sequential squares: 4, 9, 16, 25, …. The distance the ball traveled was increasing with the square of the interval multiplied by the distance traveled in the first interval. This finding allowed Galileo to debunk his critics centuries after his death and demonstrated that steeper slopes meant more speed, but by a predictable ratio.Drake did wonder how Galileo kept track of the intervals which occurred in fractions of seconds, a feat too difficult for a water clock. By recognizing the idea that musicians are able to time themselves in divisions of seconds, Galileo’s experiment was repeating using a 2-beat tune to mark the intervals. The method succeeded, and is widely believed to have been Galileo’s actual timing tool.Pavlov:Ivan Pavlov is quoted in the beginning of the chapter saying that the domestic canine is a creation of man and a frequent participant in man’s experiments. The dog’s loyalty to man is evident in its willingness to subject itself to man’s evolution of knowledge. Pavlov, though willing to expend his dogs to science, had enough of a relationship with each to name them. One of his firsts, a setter-collie mix named Druzhok (Buddy), was believed to be his favorite. Studying the mammalian digestive system, Pavlov described the “acute” animal experiments gruesomely and preferred the “chronic” approach where bodily fluids were collected while the dogs were under anesthesia. He was a first-class surgeon; once the dogs recovered from their trips under his knife, Pavlov could begin his observations.Pavlov began researching the nervous system in the early 1900s. Though he detested doing so, he would occasionally perform acute experiments which were fatal to his animals, but ultimately justified by the benefit to mankind. The dogs’ sacrifices were great, but they are immortalized by the knowledge Pavlov extracted from each death which has provided amazing insight into the brain.At one time, Pavlov was on the route to priesthood. But when Darwin and his On the Origin of Species, as well as other evolutionary and anatomical manuscripts, came into Pavlov’s reach, he became addicted to the scientific readings. In “Reflexes of the Brain”, Ivan Sechinov attributed every single human action to reflexes–muscular movements dictated by the brain. He believed reflexes were responsible for even spontaneous ideas as a result of subconscious cues. He foresaw a time when knowledge of the brain would be as keen as any other science and that these “reflexes” would become entirely predictable.Intrigued by such notions, the young Ivan Pavlov redirected his study of the church to that of science. In Saint Petersburg in 1870, he studied chemistry under Mendeleyev. Ivan gravitated toward physiology and earned his doctorate through research on the nervous system of canines and its control over cardiovascular processes. By 1891 he was the head of the physiology department of the Institute for Experimental Medicine. It was there that his surgical skill allowed him to map the cascade of reactions which occur in the gastrointestinal tract.The saliva, a mix of water and mucin, was present to lubricate the passage food took to the stomach. The stomach held “appetite juice” as well as nervous sensors, also present in the duodenum, which signaled for the preparation of gastric juices specific to whatever food needed to be digested. But Pavlov was curious about the saliva; it was still present even when the dog tasted something unappetizing, just in a form free of gastric secretions. Perhaps this watery saliva functioned purely to cleanse the palate of the unpotable substance, but how did the body sense the difference?Pavlov sought to measure the amount and composition of the saliva by first surgically relocating the ductile opening of one of the dog’s salivary glands to the outside chin or cheek. Upon recovery, he collected fluid to be analyzed. No saliva was released for pebbles of quartz. Water was elicited by white sand to wash it out. Dry bread called for a lot of drool to lubricate it adequately. And a savory chunk of meat required drool as well, but in a smaller quantity. It seemed that evolution had dictated specific salivary responses based on the animals’ environments.Pavlov believed that the animals’ reflexes allowed for various responses to balance various stimuli. For his studies on the physiology of digestion, Pavlov was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1904. Soon after, his work was ridiculed for its exclusion of the role of hormones. With that, Pavlov moved on from digestion to study a subject he deemed more important–the nervous system.The food did not actually have to be ingested to cause the dogs’ salivation. Learned responses to cues for mealtime and smells were capable of inciting these “psychic secretions”. The learned responses were not entirely instinctual, so Pavlov found he could modify them. It isn’t hard to imagine Pavlov thinking of creating specific learned responses, or adaptations, as his own brand of microevolution.In the beginning of his “inhibition” of reflexes, when the animal ceased to drool after repeatedly being shown meat, Pavlov might have thought the responses to be psychological–a sort of frustration by the dog, if you will. But he would have been quickly corrected by the fact that a taste of acid would cause the salivation to return. Were the responses products of the dogs’ thoughts, this would not be the case. And just as humans lack ESP, trying to read the thoughts of a dog would be a futile venture at best.Pavlov was becoming confused between mental and physical physiology. His previous research had been in the form of mechanical action-reaction observations where gray areas were few and far between. In order to study the central nervous system, he would need to separate his subjective self from the animals’ internal state; he could no longer “measure” his results because the psychological ideas were immeasurable. He started with what he knew to be fact: environmental factors (which cued the firing of receptors somewhere) were responsible for the salivary glands’ physiological reactions.In the 17th century, Descartes philosophized about organisms’ existences as biological machines bound to the universal laws of physics. But like many great thinkers to come, he acknowledged that the human brain defied the boundaries of any other organism; the human mind was on a whole new level of intelligence. The idea was a quid pro quo because with Darwin’s theory of natural selection also came the skepticism of how the mind could be naturally selected. William James simplified the dilemma as though the atoms of matter which form the brain somehow, over eons, oriented themselves in greater and greater conformations. The understanding of the brain and its functions was also described by Thomas Henry Huxley as one half of a team; for every chemical bodily action there is a mental counterpart. Basically, a body part does not move without the brain first directing it to do so. James, however, felt the mind to be a more romantic idea and that beings are not simply organic machines but something science could not explain.Pavlov didn’t care to debate such things he could not support by fact. He preferred to learn about his subjects’ minds from the outside, leaving no room for speculation. When a dog salivated at the smell of meat, it was natural, yet also a learned response to its experiences. He could modify the response by employing a second stimulus along with the meat which, by itself, would eventually cause salivation on its own.Even though pairing meat with a stimulus would naturally peak a dog’s interest (food is inherent to survival), Pavlov learned he could also modify this learned behavior with unsavory tastes, such as when the dogs tasted dilute acid which had been dyed black. The acid promoted salivation, and once the dog associated its response with the sight of black liquid, the sight of such alone provoked the drooling. The response could also be undone; once the dog learned the black water was without acid, the drooling response would disappear.It’s almost sadistic to cause and reverse neural connections so repeatedly, but Pavlov became well practiced in the art, knowing it was for the good of science. He was even able to change the timing of the dogs’ salivations by varying the time of the stimulus. He went on to turn time itself into a stimulus; he could feed a dog at fixed intervals and when an interval hit with no food, the salivation would still occur. In order to discriminate between such innocuous stimuli like the direction of an object’s rotation, the dogs, Pavlov thought, must possess keen neural machinery. They were able to distinguish between musical notes, shades of gray, and could even count.The experiments had to occur with strict integrity to produce meaningful data. There had to be no distractions or changes which could compromise the dogs’ entrainment, so Pavlov ordered the construction of a “Tower of Silence”. It was completely protected from external sound and vibrations; the observations were taken through periscopes to avoid contact with the specimen. Countless hypotheses were tested in the facility and they produced a conglomeration of beautiful experiments; one stood apart from the rest.Pavlov could already elicit salivation musically. And if a dog learned to drool to a specific chord, it would also drool (though to a lesser extent) to the individual notes which comprised the chord. The researchers progressed to melodies. After playing four notes in ascension, food was given. When the notes were played in reverse, no food was given. The dogs could distinguish between the two, but then they were exposed to 22 other combinations of notes. Collecting saliva to gauge the responses, the researchers found the dogs had categorized the melodies based on whether the scales rose or fell. The dogs’ brains held potential, just like humans’.Debate continued over the matters of psychology. Some though the process entirely predictable while others believed each response was unique. Even now we are torn between nature and nurture, but perhaps our time is better spent on the things we do known and the appreciation of such. Our debt to the canines who agreeably permitted their lives to be used for the advancement of science may never be paid, but like the many pieces of knowledge they provided, maybe we can all spend a little more time with our furry pals and it will add up to one big, beautiful thank-you.

⭐If one asked a group of scientists to list the most significant scientific experiments of all time, a number of the experiments in this book would no doubt make the list. But that’s not what the author is saying here. He might have as easily titled his book “The Ten Most Elegant Scientific Experiments,” and that’s how I see it. Today, when many of the most important scientific questions are being investigated via apparatus that costs millions or even billions of dollars ($2.5+ Billion for the Hubble, and $9 billion for the Large Hadron collider, for example) it is both instructive and fascinating to see how some of the most puzzling questions of the past were answered through the use of very simple apparatus. Gallileo used nothing more than (it is conjectured) a slanted track and a small ball to derive the basic equations of gravity: Distance traveled equals the square of the time elapsed multiplied by a constant. Newton solved the problem of the composition of light using a pair of prisms.Not all of the experiments described here were that simple. Michelson and Morley’s investigation into the ether required the construction of a precise optical apparatus requiring the skills of a machinist and an optician, though it certainly cost far less than a space telescope. What underlies all the experiments Johnson describes is a certain simplicity, an elegance in the way the question was asked or tested. Michelson’s interferometer experiment started with the realization that if we are in fact traveling through the “luminiferous ether”, then light should travel faster when measured in one direction than in another. While his actual experimental trials were painstakingly precise and numerous, they amounted to something very simple: Look at the interference patterns, rotate the device, and look again. EIther you see a change- or you don’t. He didn’t, and that sealed the end of the ether hypothesis.Miliken’s experiment- which also required a bit of laboratory apparatus- was deceptively simple: Measure the electrostatic charge needed to support a tiny drop of oil against the force of gravity. You had no way of actually knowing the number of atoms in an oil drop, and while the size of a drop could be measured, and the number of atoms estimated, Miliken had an insight: The charge would always be a multiple of the charge needed to suspend one atom, and form that, he could take a large number of trials and find the lowest common multiplier, as it were. SImple. Elegant. And, if you like, beautiful.George Johnson is one of the best popular science writers on the modern era, a man who can present some of the most cutting edge ideas- quantum computing, for example- in a way that goes beyond the metaphors used by most popular science writers- the “gravity is like a BB on a rubber sheet” school of science writing Part of that is his ability to bring the reader along on the same line of reasoning and insight that led him to understand a topic, and I think he’s done an excellent job of that here. Each experiment is discussed both in the context of the history of the idea, and how the scientist in question came to design his experiment. The result is clear, thought-rpovoking reading for anyone with a basic understanding of science.Like some reviewers, I would have liked to see more contemporary illustrations, in addition to the contemporary illustrations that accompany each experiment. The reader familiar with interference patterns might not have trouble understanding the discussion of the Michelson interferometer, but someone less well read in physics might benefit from a clearer diagram of what’s going on. Still, this is a very enjoyable and informative book, and even those who are familiar with all the experiments discussed will, like this reader, learn quite a bit more about each of them.

⭐Here’s a surprisingly compelling read, a lively blend of history and science filled with interesting true tidbits about the people involved. Author George Johnson’s mission is to list and describe the top 10 most “beautiful” experiments that have explored the mysteries of science. By “beautiful,” he means an experiment that has a straightforward elegance, where “confusion and ambiguity are momentarily swept aside and something new about nature leaps into view.”Each chapter covers one experiment or series of experiments. It explains the back story, the theory, the procedures the scientist used and any conclusion he or she drew. Included is a drawing or photograph of the scientist, quotes, diagrams and drawings.The most unforgettable chapter for me concerned how Ivan Pavlov trained dogs to salivate to different stimuli. Pavlov loved his animals, and gave them names such as Buddy and Gypsy and Spot. He tried to spare his dogs pain, unlike many other animal researchers. The author describes an ornate fountain topped by a large dog that graces the grounds of Pavlov’s institute still today, complete with busts of eight canines around the top, “water pouring from their mouths as they salute in salivation.”Here’s the chapter list:1. Galileo: The way things really move2. William Harvey: Mysteries of the heart3. Isaac Newton: What a color is4. Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier: The farmer’s daughter5. Luigi Galvani: Animal electricity6. Michael Faraday: Something deeply hidden7. James Joule: How the world works8. A.A. Michelson: Lost in space9. Ivan Pavlov: Measuring the immeasurable10. Robert Millikan: In the borderlandAfterword: The eleventh most beautiful experiment

⭐good book and prompt delivery.

⭐Bought for my stepson who is studying sciences and he loved the book and couldn’t wait to start reading it!

⭐Must Read ……. factual and intresting page turner .

⭐Present

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