10 Scientists, Their Experiments – and Their Lives

By JUDITH CHETTLE

THE TEN MOST BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

George Johnson

208 pages, Knopf, $22

Not too long ago, we could all understand scientific experiments because scientists used objects we recognized.

Isaac Newton observed an apple fall, and James Watt saw the steam rising from a boiling kettle’s spout. But since then, science has become laboratory-based, its vocabulary arcane – think quark – and its discoveries incomprehensible – what does string theory mean?

George Johnson, the noted New York Times science writer, acknowledging this increasing complexity, has written “The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments” as a corrective to the widening gulf. The 10 experiments he chose “were designed and conducted with such straightforward elegance that they deserve to be called beautiful . . . 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.”

In brief, generously illustrated chapters, Johnson deftly describes 10 scientists and their experiments. He begins with Galileo, not the famous drop from the Tower of Pisa, which may be a fable, but his early discovery of the speed at which an objects falls. Using wooden boards, with a channel between the two, and placing them in a sloping position, he rolled balls down and observed that the steeper the slope the faster the ball rolls, but always according to the same rule. He also measured their speed and discovered that “the distance covered increased with the square of the time.”

He describes William Harvey’s use of a bandage tied tightly on an arm to prove how blood pumped from the left ventricle returns to the right side of the heart. Newton is noted not for gravity but for discovering the properties of color and light: Using glass prisms, he learned how light refracts and how the spectrum of colors remains the same.

Familiar figures such as Luigi Galvani (electricity), Michael Faraday (electrical dynamo) and Ivan Pavlov (reflexes) are also included, as well as lesser-known scientists such as Robert Millikan (the subatomic particle), A.A. Michelson (the speed of light) and James Joule (heat produced by energy).

In clear, accessible prose, Johnson describes their experiments as vividly as their lives, which are not without incident – one scientist, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, who discovered oxygen and carbon dioxide, was guillotined during the French Revolution.

Johnson agreeably conveys his passion for science in this readable book that celebrates the serendipity of discovery by men intellectually curious about their world.

Judith Chettle is a Richmond-based book reviewer and writer.

ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO

Originally published by Special Correspondent.

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