April 12, 2008
Pure Science
From The New York Times:
The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments by George Johnson,
Beauty is truth, Keats declared, and truth beauty. Many prominent scientists have wished a version of this famous equation described their own work. The British quantum theorist Paul Dirac, for one, called his career “a search for pretty mathematics.” Most scientific aesthetes gaze fondly upon equations or arrangements of facts. A few, like the science writer George Johnson, also see beauty in the act of research. Johnson’s new book, “The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments,” is an appealing account of important scientific discoveries to which a variation of Keats applies: occasionally, beauty yields truth.
Johnson’s list is eclectic and his outlook romantic. “Science in the 21st century has become industrialized,” he states, with experiments “carried out by research teams that have grown to the size of corporations.” By contrast, Johnson (a longtime contributor to The New York Times) favors artisans of the laboratory, chronicling “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.”
His selections include the canonical and the overlooked. The first chapter describes Galileo’s studying motion by rolling balls down an incline, often considered the founding experiment of modern science. Another chapter recounts Isaac Newton’s using prisms to grasp the nature of color. But Johnson also brings to life less familiar figures like Luigi Galvani, who illuminated the nature of electricity; Albert Michelson, who (with Edward Morley) determined the constant speed of light; and — a particularly inspired choice — Ivan Pavlov, whose famous dog experiments advanced physiology and neurology.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 07:03 AM | Permalink
Comments
The trouble with books like this is that uninformed readers might conclude that this list is the only set of important experiments, when in fact many other experiments could have been included, but then the number would have exceeded the arbitrary number 10, likely dictated by the published in order to keep the book to a limited size. The list is also not necessarily either simple to perform or analyze, especially in terms of the state of knowledge of the day. The Michelson-Morley experiment is neither simple to perform nor simple to interpret. Since it provided a “negative” result, it did not prove the lack of existence of the ether, as many claim. No ether was found period, within the limits of error of the experiment. The assumption that the velocity of light is the same in all reference frames is only one interpretation of this experiment, but not necessarily the only one. But this one is likely consistent with the “law of parsimony” in science, which states that, “…the number of fundamental concepts and fundamental principles, or laws, is small.” This is quoted from “Notes on the Scientific Method”, page 756, Physics by Oscar M. Stewart, Ginn & Co., N.Y., 1924, 4th edition, 1944. This 5 page statement of the scientific method is one of the most elegant and correct ones to my knowledge. It was reviewed by Robert Millikan, the great scientist who discovered another table top experiment, “The Millikan Oil Drop Experiment”, which was performed about 1909 at the University of Chicago, and proved that all electric charge exists in discrete quantities of that on an electron, about 1.6 x 10 (-19) Coulombs. When this number is combined with the known charge to mass ratio of the electron from the earlier experiments of J. J. Thomson, the mass of the electron could be calculated. Anyone can perform this most beautiful and relatively “simple” experiment today about a century later on their kitchen table. But of course everything is “simple” isn’t it, after someone else struggles, possibly a lifetime, to understand it and explain it, “free”, to the rest of the population not endowed by their creator with such abilities. Robert Millikan was awarded the 1923 Nobel prize for this work and went on to the California Institute of Technology to make many fundamental contributions to other branches of physics, like cosmic rays. It is especially notable, especially for those who named this site, that no particle was observed or has been observed directly, with any fractional electric charge since these experiments were performed, except possibly as an artifact in the data book of the genius scientist Robert Millikan, who studied under Max Planck and Walter Nernst in Europe before performing this remarkable experiment with such remarkable and historic implications for the structure of the atom and all of physics.
Another very beautiful “table top experiment” is that proving the Rutherford Atom, as beautifully discussed in a recent book “A Force of Nature” by Richard Reeves, W.W. Norton, N.Y., 2008 and a fascinating talk he gave on it at a bookstore broadcast on C-Span.
A further example in the field of biochemistry would be the seminal experiments of Otto Warburg in Germany on cell metabolism. Dr. Warburg invented the tissue slice technique. He also invented a special instrument called the “Warburg Manometer” which measured the intercellular oxygen pressure inside living tissue, from which all living cells derive their energy of operation. In some very ingenius experiments with animal tissue performed before 1923, he was actually able to observe changes in the living tissues as a function of oxygen pressure. As the pressure was reduced by about one third, the cells (which did not die for lack of energy) became malignant, and instead of obtaining their energy from oxygen, obtained most of it anerobically from glucose like the lowest forms of life, fermentation. The transformation from normal metabolism to cancer metabolism happened quite rapidly after about 3 cell divisions. Many organs were tested many times. The results were verified by many other laboratories as well. They were first published about 1923 and later in a compendium about 1930 “The Metabolism of Tumours”. Because the transformation takes much longer, in general, for human cancer, it took roughly another 40 years to prove these results for human cancers.
But by the time of his death in 1970, Dr. Warburg had proved that all human cancers metabolize via the wasteful and inefficient process of fermentation. He proved that cancer is a disease of respiratory impairment and that all cancer is a disease caused by the wrong energy supply; fermentation. Only oxygen energy is capable of cell differentiation in higher animals. His beautiful and unifying results confirmed that cancer is nothing but the manifestation of the removal of the oxygen that created the higher living forms in the first place millions of years ago. Unfortunately, and tragically, while his experiments and facts were developed before and contemporaneously with the discovery of DNA by Watson and Crick by about 1960, the medical orthodoxy, which believes a much more complicated theory, that cancer is hundreds of different diseases, one for every organ of the host body, dismissed his experiments and facts, consistent with the scientific method and the law of parsimony, in favor of unproved speculations and hopes, unproved to this day, that cancer is genetically caused by gene mutations, without any mention or reference to his seminal experiments, published among is 500+ scientific papers and books. He was even nominated for the first “cancer prize” in 1926 for his seminal discoveries on cancer cell metabolism. He also proved that once the cancer metabolism has fully developed, it is irreversible, just as it is impossible to reverse the state of a fried egg by simply reversing the energy supply, and return the egg to its original form produced by the hen. These most beautiful and elegant experiments, by this genius level scientist in Germany, would have to be considered among the world’s most important for their own sake, and their importance to humanity, which the medical gang has negligently and criminally disregarded for decades now. Many other examples of table top experiments could be listed. Most of the most significant experiments in science are conceived and performed by genius level individuals, not groups. Just look at all the billions of public and private dollars squandered on genetics research, yet we are still in the dark ages with cancer prevention (over a half million victims every year die either from cancer, “treatment” or both) because the medical orthodoxy has failed to read and comprehend, and indeed obstructed and lied to other “scientists” and the public about, the seminal experiments of the Genius in Germany Otto Warburg M.D., Ph.D. (1883-1970), performed and proved with experiments and facts, not unproved speculations and hopes, decades ago!.
Winfield J. Abbe
A.B., Physics, UC Berkeley, 1961
Ph.D., Physics, UC Riverside, 1966
Posted by: Winfield J. Abbe | Apr 12, 2008 11:26:17 PM
Tho decide ten most beautiful experiments is an invariably subjective exercise.
Who can tell that Gelileo's experiments were more elegant than that of, say- Faraday's experiments in electricity?
Or Ibn-Al Haitham's discovery and subsequent works with pin-hole camera?
Ibn al-Haitham is also known to have used the scientific method for the first time.
It is also incorrect that it was Newton who first separated light into colours. It was Roger Bacon who did that before him. And I am not sure if Roger Bacon was the first.
Posted by: MS | Apr 12, 2008 11:46:43 PM
I verified the color thing.
It seems a guy named al-Farisi did some work on rainbow, but I could not find more details in the books available to me.
George Saliba writes-
(Chapter 7 (p 239),
Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance,
MIT Press.)
What exactly was al-Farisi's theory? How far did he get?
I do now know.
Posted by: MS | Apr 15, 2008 7:43:25 AM
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