The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments

December 3, 2007
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.

May 1, 2008
Adult/High School-Johnson pulls together nearly a dozen sketches of scientific moments-and, almost more importantly, the interesting minds and personalities that brought them into being-dating from Galileo's experiments with motion through Millikan's exposure of the electron. Along with compelling, often witty descriptions of the daily lives of the likes of the Lavoisiers and of Michelson's quest for peace of mind as well as astronomical insight, the author describes encounters with contemporary scientific players, such as the Santa Fe-area fellow who runs a kind of creative-reuse shop for neighbors in search of enormous cells and cabling with which to perform their own experiments. Teen autodidacts will love this book, both for its science and its respect for the quirky geniuses who dreamed up ways of demonstrating standards and physical laws that we now take for granted. Illustrated with the experimenters' own sketches, as well as portraits of each of the canonized 10, the narrative is accessible and a far cry from the aridity of a textbook."Francisca Goldsmith, Halifax Public Libraries, Nova Scotia"

Copyright 2008 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2008
Johnson (Miss Leavitts Stars, 2005) holds a beauty pageant for historic experiments. All are famous, and some are classroom standards, such asGalileos inclined plane or Newtons prism. Rather than the apparatus, however, Johnsons primary criterion of beauty is the simplicity of the question to be answered by the experiment, and its hard to improve on What is motion? What is light? Johnsons eight other experiments pose similarly direct questions: How does the blood circulate? wondered William Harvey; Whats air made of? mused Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. Bringing out the ingenious setups of experiments, such as how they isolated the investigated phenomenon from extraneous noise, Johnson engagingly dramatizes his stories with failure-crowned-by-success narratives, adding biographical sparks such as how Lord Byrons daughter spurred Michael Faraday to testwhether light is an electromagnetic wave. Writing up Luigi Galvanis study of frog legs, James Joules of heat, Albert Michelsons of lights speed, and Robert Millikans of the electrons charge, Johnson exerts classic appeal to science readers: presenting the lone genius making a great discovery. Good to go in any library.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)