The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments by George Johnson

The Barnes & Noble Review

Ask an intelligent question, and the universe will respond. This is the fundamental credo of all science. Questions, in the form of experiments, produce answers, in the form of replicable results. But how volubly and usefully nature will speak is a direct function of the elegance and insight manifested by the experimenter. These are the criteria that journalist George Johnson seeks in his passionate and discerning quest to chronicle The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments. With a connoisseur's eye, like some Robert Hughes of the laboratory, he sifts the past four centuries of modern science (after briefly considering the not-insubstantial accomplishments of the Classical era) for boldness of hypothesis, aesthetic arrangement of workbench materials, keenness of interpretation, and importance of results. The surprising assortment of milestone experiments he assembles derive from figures both famous (Galileo, Isaac Newton, Ivan Pavlov) and less well known (Luigi Galvani, James Joule, Robert Millikan). But in each case, Johnson absolutely convinces the reader of the seminal beauty and importance of each man's probe into the unknown. Although each chapter remains a fine independent read -- Johnson's prose is always captivating -- the accounts build on each other, so that a reference to Galileo in the chapter on Victorian scientist A. A. Michaelson brings a sharp burst of recognition at the interconnectedness of all science. Johnson's unstated theme is that of Thomas Kuhn's famous "paradigm shift." In every instance, old ways of thinking (brilliantly articulated by Johnson through inhabiting the antique mind-sets) fall, with no small amount of controversy and bitterness, beneath the new results. Phlogiston, the aether, and vis viva all end up on the rubbish heap, thanks to new worldviews that garner their power from the stunning elegance of their experimental proofs. --Paul DiFilippo

From the Publisher

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.

The Washington Post - Samantha Hunt

…a page-turner…This book establishes a state of wide-eyed wonder as the reader sees white light split into a rainbow, locates a pulse in her own neck, peers through a microscope or fires up a Bunsen burner for the very first time.

The New York Times - Peter Dizikes

Johnson's new book…is an appealing account of important scientific discoveries to which a variation of Keats applies: occasionally, beauty yields truth…Johnson has a good feel for detail—Pavlov, in fact, rarely used a bell—and an easy touch with larger concepts…[his] lively book nicely evokes the lost world of the tabletop experiment.

Publishers Weekly

Award-winning science writer Johnson (A Fire in the Mind; Strange Beauty) calls readers away from the "industrialized" mega-scale of modern science (which requires multimillion-dollar equipment and teams of scientists) to appreciate 10 historic experiments whose elegant simplicity revealed key features of our bodies and our world. Some of the experiments Johnson describes have a sense of whimsy, like Galileo measuring the speed of balls rolling down a ramp to the regular beat of a song, or Isaac Newton cutting holes in window shades and scrambling around with a prism to break light into its component colors. Other experiments-such as William Harvey's use of vivisected animals to demonstrate the circulation of blood, and the "truncated frogs" Luigi Galvani used in his study of the nervous system-remind us of changing attitudes toward animal research. Joule's effort to show that heat and work are related ways of converting energy into motion, Michelson's work to measure the speed of light, Millikan's sensitive apparatus for measuring the charge of an electron: these experiments toppled contemporary dogma with their logic and clear design as much as with their results. With these 10 entertaining histories, Johnson reminds us of a time when all research was hands-on and "the most earthshaking science came from... a single mind confronting the unknown." 73 b&w illus. (Apr. 9)

School Library Journal

Adult/High School- Johnson pulls together nearly a dozen sketches of scientific moments-and, almost more importantly, the interesting minds and personalities that brought them into being-dating from Galileo's experiments with motion through Millikan's exposure of the electron. Along with compelling, often witty descriptions of the daily lives of the likes of the Lavoisiers and of Michelson's quest for peace of mind as well as astronomical insight, the author describes encounters with contemporary scientific players, such as the Santa Fe-area fellow who runs a kind of creative-reuse shop for neighbors in search of enormous cells and cabling with which to perform their own experiments. Teen autodidacts will love this book, both for its science and its respect for the quirky geniuses who dreamed up ways of demonstrating standards and physical laws that we now take for granted. Illustrated with the experimenters' own sketches, as well as portraits of each of the canonized 10, the narrative is accessible and a far cry from the aridity of a textbook.-Francisca Goldsmith, Halifax Public Libraries, Nova Scotia

Kirkus Reviews

The New York Times science writer's favorite experiments from the golden ages of science. Johnson (Miss Leavitt's Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe, 2005, etc.) says in the prologue that he deliberately chose experiments conducted before Big Science made huge teams of researchers and truckloads of apparatus the norm. Instead, he harks back to the days when lone investigators with homemade equipment were opening the frontiers of knowledge. Some of his examples are so famous they can be evoked in a few words: Newton's rainbow, Pavlov's dogs, Galileo's falling bodies. Others, while not quite so easily epitomized, are nearly as familiar: the Michelson-Morley experiment, or Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier's discovery that oxygen is an element. Even the best known, Johnson demonstrates, are not as cut and dried as popular legend has it. For example, Pavlov rarely used bells to stimulate his dogs' salivating, and Galileo may not have dropped weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Each of the scientists has a personal story in which the famous experiment is but one element. Michael Faraday was encouraged by Lord Byron's daughter, Ada Lovelace, to do his work with electromagnetism and light after his career had apparently hit a dead-end. Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta, two of the earliest investigators of electricity, made many of their discoveries in the course of an intense rivalry over whether "animal electricity" exists. In each of these concise, evocative chapters, Johnson makes the essence of the experiment clear and captures the character of the experimenter. Additional subjects include William Harvey, the first to correctly describe thecirculation of blood; James Joule, who effectively discovered the conservation of energy; and Robert Millikan, who measured the charge of the electron. An epilogue, "The Eleventh Most Beautiful Experiment," glances at omitted experiments and invites readers to make their own lists. Pays wonderful homage to the science and scientists that helped create the modern world. First Printing of 50,000

Product Details

• ISBN: 140003423X
  
• ISBN-13: 9781400034239
• Format: Paperback, 208pp
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Pub. Date: March 10, 2009
• Sales Rank: 389,648
• Series: Vintage Ser.

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents