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    The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments
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    The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments
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    The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments
    Audiobook (abridged)3 hours

    The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments

    Written by George Johnson

    Narrated by Dion Graham

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateApr 8, 2008
    ISBN9780739359235
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments

    3.5/5

    79 ratings12 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Interesting, informative, but rather slim. Wish there was more "there" there
    • 3/5
      Experiments by famous scientists when they experienced the "ah-ha" of understanding. Much of the science is too densely written for my understanding, but there were enough side stories of families, friends and the times to hold my interest.
    • 2/5
      It was an interesting overview of what felt like arbitrarily selected experiments. They were all quite imaginative, given the times and the materials available to the experimenters. I couldn't help but notice the complete absence of women in the book, however. Surely Madame Curie's work merited inclusion. Or Lise Meitner's. Or... you get the idea. *grumble*

    • 4/5
      Lists of "the best" movies, books, sports stars, American Idols, etc. etc. are often intriguing and controversial. Science has its own lists, be they Nobelists or most-cited publications. Just a little while ago (could it really have been November, 2005?) Philip Ball's list of "elegant" chemistry experiments was my choice of the month. George Johnson chooses from a wider range of disciplines, but his "top ten" has no overlap with those in Ball's list. This rather short book does an outstanding job of describing the experimental science, with an adequate minimum about the personalities and the times of the scientists themselves. I think it is an excellent list: Galileo's laws of motion, Harvey's study of blood circulation, Newton's color experiments, Lavoisier and the quantification of gases (see my pick for January 2007, too), Galvani's connection of nerves to electricity, Faraday and electromagnetic radiation, Joule and the mechanical equivalent of heat, the Michelson-Morley experiment, Pavlov and his dogs, and Millikan's measurement of electron charge. The last is an experiment that Johson actually recreated himself (a man after my heart). This is an excellent, concise book - one in which the science speaks. You can read it in an hour or two, well-spent.
    • 4/5
      A look at ten elegant and important experiments in the history of science, from Galileo measuring the force of gravity by rolling balls down inclined planes to Robert Millikan determining the charge of an electron by observing the movements of tiny electrically charged drops of oil. In each chapter, the author describes not just the experiment itself, but other related experiments, the context of prevailing scientific belief at the time, and a few interesting facts about the researchers' lives. And yet, for me, it somehow still feels like we're only being offered a tiny, incomplete glimpse of the subject at hand. It's a very short book -- 180 pages for a prologue, an afterword, and all ten experiments -- and maybe it's just not possible to do full justice to an entire field of science in that amount of space. Still, the book does a fairly good job of demonstrating the way that science works at its best, how one beautifully designed experiment can reveal something new and profound about how the universe works, and the process by which reasonable but wrong assumptions about the world are reluctantly but inevitably replaced with a better understanding.One word of warning, though. These experiments may be scientifically beautiful, but some of them are viscerally disturbing. It's very difficult to read about William Harvey examining the beating hearts of (temporarily) still-living animals, or Isaac Newton poking needles into his own eye sockets without wincing.
    • 4/5
      Johnson's Ten Most Beautiful Experiments is a charming concept with a very different angle from the usual pop-science fare. Beginning with Galileo's work with falling objects and proceeding chronologically through to Millikan's oil-drop experiment to determine the charge of the electron, he provides brief descriptions of what he considers to be not necessarily the most important, but the most beautiful, experiments in the history of science.Unfortunately, while Johnson's descriptions of the experiments are clear and simple, he fails to provide adequate context in many cases. This didn't bother me other than intellectually; my background is in physics, so I know the context and could just sit back and enjoy a familiar story well-told, while kibbitzing about the choices, but for people less familiar with the context this could be a more serious problem. Johnson did a good job of providing the context leading up to each experiment, but stopped there, so anything following on from, say, Faraday's work with light and magnetic fields was omitted. I was most annoyed by this omission in the case of Newton's work with prisms, where there wasn't a word about later work, such as Herschel's equally beautiful demonstration that sunlight continues beyond the visible range (by placing a thermometer beyond the red end of the spectrum, in the infrared range, and noting the temperature increase.) Similarly, to a reader unfamiliar with the electromagnetic nature of light, the lack of later context of Faraday's work would have rendered that section mystifying.i have my quibbles about some of the selections, as most readers presumably do; Harvey and Pavlov, in particular, seem to have been selected more on the basis of a continuing body of work than for a particular, striking experiment. I would have omitted one or both of them, and included Rutherford's discovery of the nucleus (which, to his credit, Johnson does mention in the epilogue on the "eleventh most beautiful experiment".)Despite its flaws, this was an interesting book, and the reader left confused by the lack of context could certainly supplement that by further reading on the particular areas that interested them.
    • 4/5
      Short tellings of ten elegant scientific experiments. One could quibble with the selection, but these ten are certainly in contention.
    • 4/5
      The table of contents was not promising. The book promises the ten "most" beautiful experiments but doesn't have Rutherford discovering the nucleus? But it does have Galvani chopping up frogs to find out if they transmit electricity. But as I read, I came to appreciate Johnson's idiosyncratic selections. Rather than reading the Nth treatment of classic experiments, he presents some very interesting and well-told vignettes. Especially of Galvani and the frogs. And Pavlov, who turns out to have loved his dogs. Still, some of the vignettes, like Harvey Lavosier, were less engaging. And at some point, and this is a comment about the entire science history genre, you just do not want to spend the amount of effort the books requires to try to understand theories of two fluids pumped by the heart, phlogiston, and caloric just to learn how they were discovered to be wrong. A final thought: someone should write a book on ten experiments that failed -- and discovered something much more important as a result. Michelson and Morley would be in it, not sure the other nine, which is why someone should write it.
    • 4/5
      The table of contents was not promising. The book promises the ten "most" beautiful experiments but doesn't have Rutherford discovering the nucleus? But it does have Galvani chopping up frogs to find out if they transmit electricity.

      But as I read, I came to appreciate Johnson's idiosyncratic selections. Rather than reading the Nth treatment of classic experiments, he presents some very interesting and well-told vignettes. Especially of Galvani and the frogs. And Pavlov, who turns out to have loved his dogs.

      Still, some of the vignettes, like Harvey Lavosier, were less engaging. And at some point, and this is a comment about the entire science history genre, you just do not want to spend the amount of effort the books requires to try to understand theories of two fluids pumped by the heart, phlogiston, and caloric just to learn how they were discovered to be wrong.

      A final thought: someone should write a book on ten experiments that failed -- and discovered something much more important as a result. Michelson and Morley would be in it, not sure the other nine, which is why someone should write it.
    • 3/5
      The writing was fairly technical, so I'm not sure if this book will work for the popular audience Johnson seems to want. Johnson didn't give much context or analysis about the implications of these experiments, which I would have found more enlightening than precise descriptions of exactly how the experiments were carried out. His choices are also very heavy on physics and experimentation on animals, neither of which are particular favorites of mine.
    • 4/5
      I remember sitting through the many science classes in high school -- biology, chemistry, physics, and so on -- listening to the teachers lecture on different theories and then having us put them to use. Interesting stuff, but we were working with already-proven theories: how many calories in such and such food, how does a prism bend light, a2 + b2 = c2. Honestly, back then I just wanted to get through the classes, so I just accepted the theories and moved on.Now that I'm older, my mind wants to know why this theory is correct, how did it come about. So when I randomly pulled George Johnson's book "The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments" off a bookstore shelf, I was intrigued. And how can you not when the description in the dust jacket reads: "...and [Sir Isaac] Newton carefully inserting a needle behind his eye to learn how light causes vibrations in the retina."? (That hooked the horror fiend in me.)Johnson takes a chronological approach to the experiments, beginning with Galileo's experiments with accurately measuring the speed at objects move, Newton's use of prisms and the aforementioned needle to determine what makes color, and onward through Faraday's making the connection between magnetism and electricity and Millikan's work discovering the electron. But, instead of just stating the theory, Johnson provides the back stories, what sparked the scientists to push the envelope farther, what obstacles they had to overcome, how the mindsets at their points in history affected their experiments. And that's the fascinating part, walking with each scientist step by step through the trials, successes and failures to reach some new insight into how the world works.On a few occasions, I did find myself re-reading sections to make sure I understood what was going on. I'm not a scientist so certain facts were glossed over as if I should have known them, such as the speed of light in A.A. Michelson's study of the velocity of the Earth. In spite of that, "The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments" is fascinating and well worth a read.
    • 2/5
      Dewey - 507.8A review of 10 experiments that not only changed scientific thinking, but were examples of brilliant insight as to how to demonstrate or test a theory. Science at its best. The book was a short read, but quite interesting. I am always amazed at the ingenuity of scientists and how they can take an aha! moment to a physical experiment.