Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8502 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-08
• Released on: 2008-04-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 208 pages

From 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)
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Review
Praise for George Johnson’s The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments

“As a science journalist, Mr. Johnson is a seasoned translator of technical jargon. He also has a sharp eye for human plot, both in and out of the laboratory . . . a certain spirit of wonder breathes through Mr. Johnson’s chapters.”
-The New York Sun

“Johnson has a good feel for detail . . . and an easy touch with larger concepts . . . Johnson’s lively book nicely evokes the lost world of the tabletop experiment . . . appealing.”
-The New York Times Book Review

“Delightful, succinct, elegant.”
-Roger Penrose

“Absorbing . . .”
-Discover

“Johnson’s book is as elegant as the experiments he features . . . . The writing here is lively, mixing bits of biography with the experiments themselves, offering the human element that explains the scientists’ motivation as well as the science. Johnson shares personal anecdotes as well as theory in an engaging, compelling style. The result is a little gem of a book, enjoyable to read both as history and science.”
-Bookpage

“Johnson deftly relates the circumstances and eccentricities integral to the findings behind science’s most seminal experiments.”
-Seed Magazine

“Johnson engagingly dramatizes his stories with failure-crowned-by-success narratives, adding biographical sparks . . . Johnson exerts classic appeal to science readers: presenting the lone genius making a great discovery. Good to go in any library.”
-Booklist

“Concise, evocative . . . pays wonderful homage to the science and scientists that helped create the modern world.”
-Publisher’s Weekly

“George Johnson knows his stuff, and his stuff is science.”
-The Santa Fe New Mexican

“George Johnson’s The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments makes its point as elegantly as the experiments it describes.”
-Wall Street Journal

“Unusual and engaging . . . unfussy, jargon-free . . . Johnson is an experienced science writer with a knack for making biology and physics clear, and for finding the humanizing details in this world.”
-Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune

“[An] entertaining physics text by a skilled science writer.”
-Jeffrey Bairstow, In My View

About the Author

George Johnson writes regularly about science for The New York Times. He has also written for Scientific American, The Atlantic Monthly, Time, Slate, and Wired, and his work has been included in The Best American Science Writing. He has received awards from PEN and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and his books were twice finalists for the Rhone-Poulenc Prize. He is a co-director of the Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop, and he lives in Santa Fe.

Customer Reviews

the real value is the list itself
I really enjoyed reading this book, but it's not obvious that I couldn't have gotten just as much information out of Wikipedia. It's a nice quick read and is definitely worth the relatively small price, but the information contained is not the result of years of investigation and research. Rather, each experiment is presented succinctly and simply.

Delightful Reminders
George Johnson chose experiments that "...were those rare moments when, using the materials at hand, a curious soul figured out a way to pose a question to the universe and persisted until it replied." Most of the experiments Johnson chose are familiar to science enthusiast but usually we haven't thought about them in years; this book is a delightful reminder. The ten experiments range from Galileo's determining that objects fall at the same speed no matter their weight to Robert Millikan's oil drop experiment. Except for William Harvey and Ivan Pavlov, the experiments are about physics. Johnson is interested in the equipment and methods as well as the results so he includes drawings that often came from the scientists' journals or published articles. The notes for each chapter provide a useful bibliography. It was great fun to revisit these interesting times in science.

A guiltless pleasure
The book is a delightful surprise. I bought it mostly because I enjoy the author's unpaid appearances on bloggingheads.tv, and thought I'd show my appreciation. I've enjoyed the book more than expected. While I agree with Johnson's assessments that the experiments are truly beautiful, the book captures another important notion. By reliving the "ah ha" moments revealed by these beautiful experiments, I was continuously amazed that the simple ideas we take for granted today could be hidden from so many great minds for so long. That is, while the book is primarily a testimony to the creativity of these scientists, it is also a reminder of human limitations, of how great insights can lie so close to the surface of what we think we know.