The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments by George Johnson

Science, when it is distilled, comes down to experimentation. In this day science experimentation is relegated to huge teams of scientists with the goal of making a profit (this is broad generalization but for my purposes it makes a good point). It is rare that there are scientists doing science for the reason of pure knowledge. This is not to say that some of the scientists featured in Johnson’s book did not hope to profit from their discoveries but they sought knowledge as the principal driving force.

I am only have way through and I am thoroughly enjoying it. Johnson’s prose is succinct and clear. He has a knack of describing the experiments in a clear and concise way allowing the reader to understand what is going on. And he seems to have a genuine love for the stories he is telling.

I may not agree with all of his decisions in terms of what experiments he has chosen and his only defense is laid out in the short introduction and boils down to, “I think they are beautiful so there you have it.” The experiments he does choose, however, are tough to argue against. From Newton’s experiments with optics to Joule’s amazing example of inductive thinking with heat and work it shows how scientists are never happy with the answer of “I don’t know.”

Reading through the chapters you run across several names that should be familiar with, if not for their contributions to science, but for how we use their names now. It read like a who’s who in scientific discoveries. Johnson also shows, in an eloquent way, how science, just works. For example, Joule was working on how heat works. Before his elegant experiment of showing that heat and work come from the same place, most chemists believed that there was a element, which then called, caloric. Items that heated up had a over abundance of the stuff, and gradually lost it as it cooled off. But as more scientists worked on the problem, Joule in particular, they found that they could not explain it with the transfer of caloric. As Joule did his experiments he gradually broke down that conception of caloric being the cause of heat. Phlogistan, as well as caloric and other discarded ideas, are good examples of how scientific ideas live and die by their evidence.

I suppose Johnson is telling these stories to show that experimentation, when you look at closely, is a dance between art, logic, rational thinking, trial and error, and moments of pure luck. Louis Pasteur once wrote that, “Dans les champs de l’observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés.” or “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.” And all the scientists that Johnson writes about embody what Pasteur was getting at. Capitalizing on that moment of pure luck wouldn’t happen with any lay person. We would have missed separating oxygen from the atmosphere like Lavoisier as he burned charcoal.

Johnson also shows how brilliant all of these experimenters are. As well as their contemporaries. Albert Michelson measured, to great accuracy, the speed of light. He did it one earth in in 1926. No computers, no lasers, nothing but prisms and intellect. I couldn’t even begin to figure out how to try to measure the speed of light.

Just reading this gives you a sense of how experimentation works. How scientists fail but keep on going because they have this innate ability to want to figure it out. Granted they are wrong at times. But the great thing about it is that it gets corrected and science builds on those mistakes.

This book is a short and fast read.  And very enjoyable.  I could see how hard it would be for Johnson to choose just ten experiments but he did a good job in choosing the ones he did.