The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, George Johnson

A small book filled with lots of information as science writer George Johnson tries to describe both the experiments and the context of the experiments.

The ten:

1.      Galileo: The Way Things Really Move – measure movement of falling

2.      William Harvey: Mysteries of the Heart

3.      Isaac Newton: What a color is (prisms and experiments with light)

4.      Antoine-Laurent Laavosier: The Farmer’s Daughter (finding oxygen)

5.      Luigi Galvani: Animal Electricity (the nervous system)

6.      Michael Faraday:  Something Deeply Hidden (connecting light, magnetism, and electricity)

7.      James Joule: How the World Works (light and electromagnetism)

8.      A. A. Michalson: Lost in Space (measuring light)

9.      Ivan Pavlov: Measuring the immeasurable (response and learning)

10.   Robert Millikan: In the Borderland (finding electrons)

My favorite story:

“Midway through the eighteenth century, when electricity was all the rage, an amateur scientist stood before the Royal Society in London and described what might be called Symmer’s law: opposite-colored socks attract while like-colored socks repel.  To keep his feet comfortable in winter, the speaker, a government clerk named Robert Symmer was accustomed to wearing to layers of stockings.  In the morning, he would pull white socks over a black woolen pair.  In the afternoon he would reverse them. During the transition, the two different materials crackled and bristled with opposite charges, and Symmer, who became known as the barefoot philosopher, would sit back in his chair marveling at the results.

“’When this experiment is performed with two black stocking in one hand and two white in the other,’ he reported, ‘it exhibits a very curious spectacle: The repulsion of those of the same colour, and the attraction of those of different colours, throws them into an agitation that is not unentertaining.’”