What Are Physics Experiments?

Two American scholars conducted a survey among physicists across the United States, asking them to nominate the top ten best physical experiments ever, and the results were published in the "Physics World" magazine.

Ten classic physics experiments

Surprisingly, the top ten classic experiments are almost all performed independently by one person, or at most with one or two assistants to assist. No large computing tools such as computers were used in the experiments, at most they were rulers or calculators.

Another commonality of all these experiments is that they only "grabbed" the "most beautiful" scientific soul in the eyes of physicists: the simplest instruments and equipment, and found the most fundamental and pure scientific concepts, like Like monuments of history, it clears people's long-standing confusion and ambiguity, and opens up a new understanding of nature.

From the selection of the top ten classic scientific experiments, we can also clearly see the most significant discovery trajectory of scientists since 2000, just like our "bird's eye" history. The New York Times on September 24 made a special introduction to this.

In chronological order:

Eratosthenes

Ranked ninth. Rutherford has performed the famous alpha particle scattering experiment since 1909, and overthrew Thomson's "jujube cake model". On this basis, Rutherford proposed a nuclear structure model.

Collimated

Number one. Both Newton and Thomas Young's conclusions on the nature of light have not been completely correct. Light is neither a simple particle nor a simple wave. In the early 20th century, Max Planck and Albert Einstein respectively pointed out that something called a photon emits and absorbs light. But other tests have proved that light is a wave. After decades of development, quantum theory finally summed up two contradictory truths: photons and subatomic particles (such as electrons, photons, etc.) are particles with two properties at the same time, which are physically called: wave-particle duality .

The transformation of Thomas Young's double-slit demo is a good illustration of this. Scientists used electron flow instead of light beams to explain the experiment. According to quantum mechanics, the electric particle flow is divided into two parts, and the smaller particle flow produces wave effects, which interact with each other to produce enhanced light and shadows as shown in Thomas Yang's double slit demonstration. This shows that particles also have the effect of waves.

Who did this test the earliest is no longer valid. According to a paper published in Physics Today, it is speculated that it should be in 1961.