The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments - Arvind Gupta

212 Pages·2012·13.06 MB·English

by  George Johnson

THE TEN MOST
BEAUTIFUL
EXPERIMENTS
G E O R GE J O H N S ON
U.S.A. $22.95
CANADA $25.95
FROM the acclaimed New York Times science
writer George Johnson, an irresistible book on
the ten most fascinating experiments in the
history of science—moments when a curious
soul posed a particularly eloquent question
to nature and received a crisp, unambiguous
reply.
Johnson takes us to those times when the
world seemed filled with mysterious forces,
when scientists were dazzled by light, by elec-
tricity, and by the beating of the hearts they laid
bare on the dissecting table.
We see Galileo singing to mark time as
he measures the pull of gravity, and Newton
carefully inserting a needle behind his eye to
learn how light causes vibrations in the retina.
William Harvey ties a tourniquet around his
arm and watches his arteries throb above
and his veins bulge below, proving that blood
circulates. Luigi Galvani sparks electrical cur-
rents in dissected frog legs, wondering at the
twitching muscle fibers, and Ivan Pavlov makes
his now-famous dogs salivate at ascending
chord progressions.
For all of them, diligence was rewarded.
In an instant, confusion was swept aside and
something new about nature leaped into view.
In bringing us these stories, Johnson restores
some of the romance to science, reminding us
of the existential excitement of a single soul
staring down the unknown.
T HE TEN MOST
BEAUTIFUL
EXPERIMENTS
ALSO BY GEORGE JOHNSON
Miss Leavitt's Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman
Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe
A Shortcut Through Time: The Path to the Quantum Computer
Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and
the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics
Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order
In the Palaces of Memory:
How We Build the Worlds Inside Our Heads
Machinery of the Mind:
Inside the New Science of Artificial Intelligence
Architects of Fear:
Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics
T HE T EN M O ST
BEAUTIFUL
EXPERIMENTS
George Johnson
ALFRED A. KNOPF NEW YORK 2008
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2008 by George Johnson
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random
House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Johnson, George, [datel
The ten most beautiful experiments / by George Johnson.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-4000-4101-5
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Science—Experiments. I. Title.
Q182.3.J65 2008
507.8—DC22 2OO7O27839
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition
When Albert Einstein was an old man and sat down to
write a short volume of autobiographical notes—
"something like my own obituary"—he remembered
the day his father showed him a compass. Turning
it this way and that, the boy watched in wonder as
the needle pointed insistently north. "I can still
remember—or at least believe I can remember—
that this experience made a deep and lasting impres-
sion upon me," Einstein wrote. "Something deeply
hidden had to be behind things."

C O N T E N TS
Prologue ix
1. Galileo: The Way Things Really Move 3
2. William Harvey: Mysteries of the Heart 17
3. Isaac Newton: What a Color Is 31
4. Antoinc-Laurcnt Lavoisier: The Farmer's
Daughter 45
5. Luigi Galvani: Animal Electricity 60
6. Michael Faraday: Something Deeply Hidden 75
7. James Joule: How the World Works 88
8. A. A. Michelson: Lost in Space 104
9. Ivan Pavlov: Measuring the Immeasurable 121
10. Robert Millikan: In the Borderland 138
Afterword: The Eleventh Most Beautiful
Experiment 157
Notes and Bibliography 159
Acknowledgments 179
Index 181