Top 10 Beautiful Physics Experiments
The list below shows the top 10 most frequently mentioned experiments by readers of Physics World.
Top 10 beautiful experiments
1 Young's double-slit experiment applied to the interference of single electrons
2 Galileo's experiment on falling bodies (1600s)
3 Millikan's oil-drop experiment (1910s)
4 Newton's decomposition of sunlight with a prism (1665-1666)
5 Young's light-interference experiment (1801)
6 Cavendish's torsion-bar experiment (1798)
7 Eratosthenes' measurement of the Earth's circumference (3rd century BC)
8 Galileo's experiments with rolling balls down inclined planes (1600s)
9 Rutherford's discovery of the nucleus (1911)
10 Foucault's pendulum (1851)
Others experiments that were cited included:
- Archimedes' experiment on hydrostatics
- Roemer's observations of the speed of light
- Joule's paddle-wheel heat experiments
- Reynolds's pipe flow experiment
- Mach & Salcher's acoustic shock wave
- Michelson-Morley measurement of the null effect of the ether
- Röntgen's detection of Maxwell's displacement current
- Oersted's discovery of electromagnetism
- The Braggs' X-ray diffraction of salt crystals
- Eddington's measurement of the bending of starlight
- Stern-Gerlach demonstration of space quantization
- Schrödinger's cat thought experiment
- Trinity test of nuclear chain reaction
- Wu et al.'s measurement of parity violation
- Goldhaber's study of neutrino helicity
- Feynman dipping an O-ring in water
