Favorite Experiments?

Dr Adequate

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The criterion here is elegance. Can you suggest some experiments which were a nice elegant test of a hypothesis, the elegance of which can be explained to someone outside the field?

Thank you.
 
The Milgram experiment. Nothing before or since has shown how evil people are in a controlled environment.
 
strathmeyer said:
The Milgram experiment. Nothing before or since has shown how evil people are in a controlled environment.
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Not an experiment because it had no independent variable. Technically it was a demonstration. I doubt that that the Research Ethics Board at Yale would approve it today. If not approved, then it could not be published in any mainstream psych journal.

And the Third Reich surely demonstrated this before.
 
Jeff Corey said:
Not an experiment because it had no independent variable. Technically it was a demonstration. I doubt that that the Research Ethics Board at Yale would approve it today. If not approved, then it could not be published in any mainstream psych journal.
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Thanks, I'll be sure to tell everyone to stop calling it the "Milgram experiment".
 
The series of experiments that showed that plants:

Do not obtain most of their mass from the soil
Do not obtain most of their mass from water
That plants alter the properties of air
That plants gain most of their mass from the air
That plants require sunlight to alter the properties of air

All of which led to the discovery of photosynthesis.

The experiments are simple and easy to explain, not least because the apparatus is very familiar to most people (seeds, bucket, glass jar, mouse). No need to explain complicated instrumentation.

This link takes you through the discoveries sequentially.
 
strathmeyer said:
Thanks, I'll be sure to tell everyone to stop calling it the "Milgram experiment".
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Good. Then you will be in good company with all the psych textbooks who call it the "Milgram study" because the authors know what an experiment is.
 
As usual, Wikipedia has a list. My personal favorites on the list are the double slit experiment, Pascal's discovery of the barometer, and the Meselson-Stahl experiment, and of course Milgram's experiments on human obedience (referred to as "The Miligram Experiment" 58,700 times in a google search). My favorite not on the list is Rat Park.

I noticed that all of the experiments listed are more than ten years old, so they are boring. More recent experiments that might be considered would be Luca Turin's use of isotopes to disprove the shape theory of olfaction, or the experiments that demonstrated that Helicobacter pylori is the cause of peptic ulcers. Sniffing chemicals and drinking bacteria is totally elegant.
 
Instead of posting famous experiments that changed the world, I'd like to offer up one of my favorite highschool physics experiments.

We measured the speed of light by sending a laser through a beam splitter and having one beam immediately hit a detector connected to an oscilloscope. We dialed in the oscilloscope so that the waveform was steady on the screen. We then sent the split beam down the hall and bounced it back off a mirror and hit another detector. We then saw the exact same waveform, but with a time shift. This shift equaled the time it took to travel and a simple length calculation allowed us to compute the speed of light in air to 3 significant digits. we even changed the pathlength and saw the linear change in the time shift.

To this day, the simplicity of the experiment and calculation floored me. Impossible to imagine values (the speed of light) dissolved into something as simple as calculating Pi. I loved that experiment.
 
My own experiments with a fifth of tequila. The detrimental effects on my personal life were quantifiable and repeatable.
 
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I had a high school teacher that demonstrated Newton's Laws using a tennis racket and a ball, indoors.


My favorite experiments were chemistry. We took a simple acid and several over the counter stomach acid neutralizers to see which worked best and and at what quantities.


Boo
 
One I liked that I saw recently was Julia Child doing the Primordial Soup Experiment.

For success I'd go with COBE.
 
The Michelson Morlay Experiment, but I'm slightly biased because I graduated from the University where they performed the experiments (albeit 120 years later)

Not so easy to explain to laymen (even I don't fully get it, but I only took 2 semesters of physics), but a great example of an experiment designed to do one thing, that instead, disproved it, and turned the whole field on it's head.

In summary: in the 19th century, physicists figured that light had to propagate through something, so they invented Luminiferous aether. Michelson and Morley designed an experiment to measure relative motion of the earth and the arther wind. Instead, they ended up disproving that aether existed at all.

EDIT: This also resulted in the first American (Michelson) to win a Nobel prize in the sciences.
 
Jeff Corey said:
Good. Then you will be in good company with all the psych textbooks who call it the "Milgram study" because the authors know what an experiment is.
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I'm sorry, Jeff, but you can't discount and experiment you don't like by refusing to call it an experiment. I can't believe you made me go look this up in a textbook. Shame on you.
 
Stanford Prison experiment, Michaelson-Morley (which is what joobz's hs experiment was based on) and Oersted's magnetism experiments (another great example of a cock-up gone horribly right.)
 
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