The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 3 DEC. 2007

Award-winning science writer Johnson (A Fire in the Mind; Strange Beauty) calls readers away from the "industrialized" mega-scale of modern science (which requires multimillion-dollar equipment and teams of scientists) to appreciate 10 historic experiments whose elegant simplicity revealed key features of our bodies and our world. Some of the experiments Johnson describes have a sense of whimsy, like Galileo measuring the speed of balls rolling down a ramp to the regular beat of a song, or Isaac Newton cutting holes in window shades and scrambling around with a prism to break light into its component colors. Other experiments such as William Harvey's use of vivisected animals to demonstrate the circulation of blood, and the "truncated frogs" Luigi Galvani used in his study of the nervous system remind us of changing attitudes toward animal research. Joule's effort to show that heat and work are related ways of converting energy into motion, Michelson's work to measure the speed of light, Millikan's sensitive apparatus for measuring the charge of an electron: these experiments toppled contemporary dogma with their logic and clear design as much as with their results. With these 10 entertaining histories, Johnson reminds us of a time when all research was hands-on and "the most earthshaking science came from... a single mind confronting the unknown." 73 b&w illus.