Top Eleven: Henry Cavendish

Next up in the Top Eleven is an experiment whose basic technique is still in use today. Who: Henry Cavendish (1731-1810), a British scientist who made a number of discoveries in physics and chemistry, but received credit for very few of them. When: 1797. What: Cavendish’s modern claim to fame is the torsion pendulum experiment, […]

Top Eleven: Isaac Newton

Third in the Top Eleven is Sir Isaac Newton, who squeaks in with two nominations for two different experiments. Who: Isaac Newton (1642-1727), famous English physicist, mathematician, alchemist, Master of the Mint, and Neal Stephenson character. When: Newton was secretive and reluctant to publish anything, so it’s sort of hard to assign dates. I’m going […]

Top Eleven: Ole Roemer

The second in the Top Eleven is the first quantitative measurement of the speed of light, by Ole Christensen Roemer (whose last name ought to contain an o-with-a-slash-through-it, that I’ve rendered as an “oe”). Who: Ole Roemer (1644-1710), a Danish astronomer. When: The crucial observations were made around 1675. What: Roemer made careful observations of […]

Top Eleven: Galileo Galilei

The first and oldest of the experiments in the Top Eleven is actually a two-fer: Galileo Galilei is nominated both for the discovery of the moons of Jupiter, and for his experiments on the motion of falling objects. Who: Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), the great Italian physicist, astronomer, and general Renaissance man. When: He’s known to […]

Get Out the Vote

Today is the last day to vote in Cosmic Variance’s Greatest Physics Paper contest. If you haven’t voted yet, go over there and pick a paper. Locally, I’m still collecting nominees for the Greatest Physics Experiment. A quick scan through the comments gives the current list as: The Michelson-Morley experiment disproving the aether. Rutherford’s discovery […]

Future Great Experiments

Looking at the ScienceBlogs front page, I suspect that I may be well out of my league, especially when it comes to posting frequency. There’s just no way I can post that many entries in one day, especially not a day like Thursday. In addition to my lab this morning (in which half the students […]

Greatest. Experiment. EVER.

Quite a while back, Clifford Johnson at Cosmic Variance had a post seeking nominations for “The Greatest Physics Paper Ever.” Back after a long hiatus, he’s now holding a vote among five finalists: Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, Albert Einstein’s General Relativity, Emmy Noether’s paper on symmetry and conservation laws, Dirac’s theory of the electron, and […]