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The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments
George Johnson
#UC0802
Hardcover, 192 pages; 2008
$22.95
 Members' Price: $19.51
This is beauty in the classical sense—the logical simplicity of the apparatus, like the logical simplicity of the analysis, seems as pure and inevitable as the lines of a Greek statue. Confusion and ambiguity are momentarily swept aside and something new about nature leaps into view.
The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments celebrates the understated elegance of historic endeavors to better understand the world, from Galileo's measurement of the pull of gravity in 1604 to Robert Millikan's isolation of the basic unit of electrical charge in 1906. Unlike modern scientific investigations that cost millions of dollars, employ teams of researchers, and utilize data-crunching supercomputers, each of these experiments involved a single curious thinker using simple tools to make a revolutionary discovery. In succinct chronological chapters supplemented with explanatory illustrations, New York Times science writer George Johnson clearly relates the historical context of the experiments, the scientific principles at stake, and a bit about the experimenters. His accessible and enthusiastic prose makes for a lyrical tribute to the essence of the scientific process.
(AG)
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