Chad Orzel’s competition to choose the Greatest Physics Experiment — via the magic of the ballot box — is almost coming to close, so go vote soon. Nominees include Galileo, Roemer, Newton, Cavendish, Faraday, Michelson and Morley, Hertz, Rutherford, Hubble, Mössbauer, and Aspect. I totally think Galileo should win, for discovering the moons of Jupiter — it’s not every day you simultaneously demonstrate the value of perhaps the single most useful instrument in the physical sciences (the telescope), but also show that the Earth is not the center of the universe.
Meanwhile, coturnix of Science and Politics, guest-blogging at Majikthise, points to his growing list of science blogs. Who knew there were so many? Remember, if you have a physics- or astronomy-oriented blog that is not manifestly crazy, we’re happy to put it on the “Physics and Astronomy Blogs” list here at CV.
February 22nd, 2006 at 11:37 am
‘…not manifestly crazy…’
‘We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.’ – Niels Bohr to Wolfgang Pauli, 1957.
Pauli had written to Fierz, 12 August 1948: ‘I think the important and extremely difficult task of our time is to try to build up a fresh idea of reality.’
It is interesting Pauli also invented the put-down ‘not even wrong’ to dismiss non-predictive nonsense. People often seem to dismiss ideas as being ‘crazy’ and fail to remember that the neutrino was just such a suggestion (Bohr initially argued that beta decay could be explained by a statistical violation of energy conservation!). There is no correlation between being crazy and being wrong.
February 22nd, 2006 at 2:39 pm
This is a bit premature, as I’m still shaking the bugs out and only beginning to add content… but I’m working on a personal physics research wiki (rather than a blog) that may nevertheless be appropriate to add to your list:
Deferential Geometry
I’m adding a few pages of notes a day. It will take me a couple of months to really get it into full gear. And be warned that it may not be happy with the latest Firefox 1.5.0.1.
But, well, it’s new… and it will get better.
February 22nd, 2006 at 3:35 pm
Where is Young’s double-slit experiment? Using single photons as the light source it reveals all counterintuitive aspects of quantum mechanics. No list of best physics experiments should be without it.
February 23rd, 2006 at 5:33 am
Young falsely claimed that light somehow cancels out at the dark fringes on the screen.
We know energy is conserved. Light simply doesn’t arrive at the dark fringes (if it does, what happens to it, especially where you fire one photon at a time!!!!!!????).
So what really happens with light is interference near the double slits, which is not the case for water wave type interference (water waves are longitudinal so interfere at the screen, light waves have a transverse feature which allows interference to occur even when a single photon passes through one of two slits, if the second slit is nearby, i.e., within a wavelength or so!).