The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments | George Johnson

The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments | George Johnson | Delightful Reminders

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The Ten Most Beaut...

	The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments George Johnson Knopf, 2008 - 208 pages average customer review:based on 12 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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 electricity, 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 currents 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.

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A guiltless pleasure

The book is a delightful surprise. I bought it mostly because I enjoy the author's unpaid appearances on bloggingheads.tv, and thought I'd show my appreciation. I've enjoyed the book more than expected. While I agree with Johnson's assessments that the experiments are truly beautiful, the book captures another important notion. By reliving the "ah ha" moments revealed by these beautiful experiments, I was continuously amazed that the simple ideas we take for granted today could be hidden from so many great minds for so long. That is, while the book is primarily a testimony to the creativity of these scientists, it is also a reminder of human limitations, of how great insights can lie so close to the surface of what we think we know.

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Delightful Reminders

George Johnson chose experiments that "...were those rare moments when, using the materials at hand, a curious soul figured out a way to pose a question to the universe and persisted until it replied." Most of the experiments Johnson chose are familiar to science enthusiast but usually we haven't thought about them in years; this book is a delightful reminder. The ten experiments range from Galileo's determining that objects fall at the same speed no matter their weight to Robert Millikan's oil drop experiment. Except for William Harvey and Ivan Pavlov, the experiments are about physics. Johnson is interested in the equipment and methods as well as the results so he includes drawings that often came from the scientists' journals or published articles. The notes for each chapter provide a useful bibliography. It was great fun to revisit these interesting times in science.

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the real value is the list itself

I really enjoyed reading this book, but it's not obvious that I couldn't have gotten just as much information out of Wikipedia. It's a nice quick read and is definitely worth the relatively small price, but the information contained is not the result of years of investigation and research. Rather, each experiment is presented succinctly and simply.

Great theme, lacks accuracy

Very readable, with notes and citations by page number, an index, and good illustrations, the idea of the book should have been irresistible to the publisher. Experiments or investigations by Galileo on motion, Harvey on blood circulation, Newton on color, Lavoisier on combustion, Galvani on bioelectricity, Faraday on the connection between magnetism and electricity, Joule on the relation of heat and work, Michelson on the speed of light, Pavlov on mental conditioning, and Millikan on the charge on the electron were chosen. My only disappointment on the choice was that only the last was from the twentieth century, and the beginning of it at that. Why not a baker's dozen? The personalities of the scientists and their conflicts were well covered.

Yet all was not well. So much of science is expressed in equations. There were none seen in the text, and only one in the citations. No graphs, either. Whether this book was intended for older children or adults who regretted skipping science, one of the most important aspects of good science writing is accuracy, which is lacking, and followup so as not to leave a misleading impression from an old experiment. And why not have used the metric system with a handy table of equivalents?

On p4: "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." There were no qualifications for these two statements. Consider a kilogram of lead and a 5-kilo bag of feathers. You know which will fall faster.

On p6: "All other things being equal, the speed at which an object falls is independent of its weight." Well, if air is the medium, why does a lead bullet travel farther than an iron bullet of the same weight? I think it is because that the denser lead bullet presents more mass per area to the air.
On p36: "There is a Hooke's law as well, precisely describing the nature of elasticity: the amount a solid can be stretched is proportional to the force that is applied." Again, there are no qualifications. Think of a salt crystal glued to the platens of a tensile strength instrument. Over some range of force no stretching will be seen, then a fracture, so no proportional reaction. Think of a steel bar: some amount of stretch will be proportional to the force, then the steel will yield and stretch a lot with only a little more force, then it will break. Some things should not be oversimplified, even for children.

On p41 for analyzing light with prisms: "The second prism undid what the first had done, leaving a colorless circle of light on the wall." How could one see a colorless circle of light? Of course, the circle of light was white, not colorless. This feeds into the common misuse of the word "white" for a clear liquid, clear meaning that you could read a newspaper through it. Milk is white; water is colorless.

On p43: "A reflecting telescope he [Newton] invented, six inches long and more powerful than a conventional [refracting?] telescope ten times its size [60 inches long]..." The size of a telescope is always given by the diameter of its mirror or lens, not its length.

On p79 for an experiment of Faraday's: "If he wound the wire into a spiral, the magnetic force was even stronger, concentrated inside the center of the coil." Here was a chance, not to pander to common misusage, but to inform. A spiral is the form of an old style watch spring. A coil or coil spring is the solid figure properly called a helix. I suppose the most damage was done decades ago by the manufacturer of the "spiral-bound notebook", which of course, is a helix.

On p115, author Johnson seems to report that Michelson found the speed of light the same in any direction within experimental error. Others say that Michelson reported a difference of 20 km/sec and attributed it to experimental error. A Dayton Miller put together a far better apparatus and spent 3 decades measuring to find a difference of 20 km/sec which was not due to experimental error. This means that there is an "ether" and that the speed of light is not a constant in vacuum. See: John O'Malley Bockris, "The New Paradigm", 2005, p108.

The descriptions are excellent, and author Johnson repeated the Millikan oil drop experiment himself with decent results. Absent my observations, a 5-star rating would have been a cinch. If you give this book to someone else as a gift, I suggest you put a copy of this review in it.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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