The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments

The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments
Author: George Johnson 2008 158 pp
My rating: 2.5/3*
Started May 22 2008, Finished May 22 2008

This slight book was a nice change of pace from my usual fare, but its orientation towards scientific detail indicates why I gravitate towards that usual fare – I often don’t understand the scientific detail. For any of the experiments, the author does at least a decent job of stating the history and significance of the issue the investigator was trying to resolve, and I generally understood the resulting ingenious experiment, but for some of the earlier experiments I tended to lose the thread during the discussion of the results and how and why the lead to the conclusion that they did. Perhaps Johnson could have belabored the final phases of his discussions for those slow on the uptake such as myself. Another problem I had was that to illustrate the procedural details or important equipment used in each experiment, Johnson includes either the scientist’s original drawings and notes or a newly commissioned drawing apparently taken from a photograph; in the former case, the experimenters turn out to be anything but skillful artists and in the later, a copy of the photograph itself would have been clearer. As a result, I often could not visualize exactly what was being depicted and my understanding of the experiment was muddled.

A noteworthy feature of this book for me was its substantial overlap with one of my all time favorites, The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History by Michael H Hart: Gallileo, Harvey, Newton, Lavoisier and Farraday were generally famililiar to me from upper half of Hart’s ranking, though it was enjoyable to see aspects of their work examined in much greater detail.

The chapter on Newton, the preeminent figure in the history of science (#2 in Hart’s list) provides a stunning example of the power of serendipity. The great one’s first epochal contribution to science, his early work on optics, were basically a result of the Great Plague of 1665 which forced him to hole up with his family in the country. In this rural isolation, Newton had the time and absence of distraction to fully contemplate issues that had intrigued him, leading to his investigation of the composition of light and its monumental results. One wonders how different Newton’s life, the history of science and thus the entire course of world historical development, if not for this forced retreat and the investigation it engendered, the success of which must of done wonders for Newton’s confidence and spurred him on to his even greater work.

I was torn about whether to give this book 2.5 or three stars. Its biggest problem is its lack of heft – low page count, small pages, lots of white space and a fair amount of biographical padding indicate that the author and publisher had to stretch to justify its existence as a book – result in a faint impression on the reader. On the other hand, all of the experiments that I understood were really quite cool, inspirational examples of human ingenuity and often genius at work; e.g. though Gallileo’s method of determining the time required for different size objects to fall was in itself quite interesting, the historical legwork that was required to determine that he actually conducted the experiment as well as the deductive process used to develop a plausible theory of how he conducted split second timing before clocks that could measure such intervals existed, was even more intriguing. The evolution of Joule’s attempts to identify what eventually came to be termed energy, from setups so complicated and kludgey that his contemporary scientific audience did not really understand what he was on about to a very elegant, almost self explanatory experiment was somewhat awe inspiring. The final two experiments, measuring the speed of light (not theoretically calculating it) and “weighing” individual electrons (this experiment illuminatingly recreated by the author) were breathtaking in both their audacity and success – I would have considered both feats beyond the realm of possibility.

I also liked this book for reminding me of how benighted scientific thought was for much of human history, a point that seems to be driven home by any wide ranging scientific history e.g. The 100 … or The Discoverers. The two thousand or so years between the fall of Rome and the renaissance were such an intellectually stagnant time that as late as Joule’s time, the mid 19th century, people still adhered to theories concocted by the ancient Greeks with no tangible basis (cf phlogiston). Of course the utter invalidity of accepted scientific wisdom throughout most of human history leads one to wonder how much of what we currently hold as gospel (western medicine comes to mind) is completely nonsense. Example: which seems more ridiculous, or Pythagoras’ speculation that fire “is made of twenty-four right-angle triangles, surrounded by four equilaterals, which are made in turn of six triangles.” (page xiii) or modern day superstring theory, “which posits that matter is ultimately generated my mathematical snippets vibrating in ten-dimensional space” (page xii).