The Top 10 Science Experiments of All Time

[longknife]

Discover always comes up with interesting articles. I’m sure there are others, but these 10 seem to top any list.

3rd Century BC – Eratosthenes measures the world.

1628 – William Harvey discovers blood circulation

1855-1863 – Gregor Mendel experiments with the fundamental rules of genetic inheritance

1665-1666- Isaac Newton on the nature of colors and light (thought it was going to be the apple thing?)

1887 – Michelson and Morley Whiff on the way light moves

1898 – Marie Curie defines radioactivity

1890s – 1900s – Ivan Paval on the discovery of conditioned reflexes

1909 – Robert Milikan determines the precise value of a single electron’s charge

1801 and 1927, respectively - Young, Davisson and Germer on the wavelike nature of light and electrons

1966 – Robert Paine on the disproportionate impact of keystone species on ecosystems

The details of each @ The Top 10 Science Experiments of All Time | DiscoverMagazine.com

 

[Frannie]

Discover always comes up with interesting articles. I’m sure there are others, but these 10 seem to top any list.

3rd Century BC – Eratosthenes measures the world.

1628 – William Harvey discovers blood circulation

1855-1863 – Gregor Mendel experiments with the fundamental rules of genetic inheritance

1665-1666- Isaac Newton on the nature of colors and light (thought it was going to be the apple thing?)

1887 – Michelson and Morley Whiff on the way light moves

1898 – Marie Curie defines radioactivity

1890s – 1900s – Ivan Paval on the discovery of conditioned reflexes

1909 – Robert Milikan determines the precise value of a single electron’s charge

1801 and 1927, respectively - Young, Davisson and Germer on the wavelike nature of light and electrons

1966 – Robert Paine on the disproportionate impact of keystone species on ecosystems

The details of each @ The Top 10 Science Experiments of All Time | DiscoverMagazine.com

The discovery of DNA doesn't rank?

What about all the work resulting in this communication

 

[BlindBoo]

First on my list is metallurgy.

 

[Damaged Eagle]

*****SMILE*****

 

[Damaged Eagle]

*****SMILE*****

 

[westwall]

Wow, there so many better ones they could have chosen.

 

[zaangalewa]

Wow, there so many better ones they could have chosen.

And lots of important scientists are nearly unkown, although they often found out unbelievable important things. For example Gustav Theodor Fechner, the founder of psychophysics. You don't know, who Fechner was and what psychophysics is? You are not alone. Psychophysics is the psychology of perception of physical stimuli. It's very important in our daily life - for example is the dezibel scale a psychophysical scale. And Gustav Theodor Fechner made besides this also critics on the methods of science of his time (19th century) by arguing with the scientific accepted methods of his time in a satire "the moon is made of jodine" (an medicine for the desinfection of wounds, wich was often used very careless). Perhaps you have heard once the sentence: "The moon is made of green cheese". That's a variation of this theme. Practically this was a serios valid conclusion with the scientific methods of the 19th century.
Today we have for example the problem, that lots of scientific methods find out a similiar nonsense with the "perfect" scientific methods of our days. The problem: Publications in international [electronic] papers are made, when its spectacular, what someone finds out. But who repeats this experiments and is not able to find out, what such a study really says, is in a bad situation - and not the scientist, who made such a bad description of his experiments and his conclusions, that someone is not easily able to repeat the experiment and to find out the correct conclusions.

Which experiments do I love most? ... Archimedes, who ran naked through Athens and called "heureka", because he found out the natural law of specific weight. The call "hooray" - often perverted used to motivate soldiers to kill enemies - is a relict of this in our time. And what I find very funny is the inclined plane, which was used from Galileo Galilei. But it was an excellent idea to slow down a free fall. Or what's even more funny is an experiment of Hermann Oberth: He paddled with a little boat on a lake and threw stones into the lake and moved the boat in this way: reaction principle (The German word "Rückstoßprinzip" is better in this case). Later this kind of research brought someone to the moon, who said there: 'That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind'.

 

[ThunderKiss1965]

Discover always comes up with interesting articles. I’m sure there are others, but these 10 seem to top any list.

3rd Century BC – Eratosthenes measures the world.

1628 – William Harvey discovers blood circulation

1855-1863 – Gregor Mendel experiments with the fundamental rules of genetic inheritance

1665-1666- Isaac Newton on the nature of colors and light (thought it was going to be the apple thing?)

1887 – Michelson and Morley Whiff on the way light moves

1898 – Marie Curie defines radioactivity

1890s – 1900s – Ivan Paval on the discovery of conditioned reflexes

1909 – Robert Milikan determines the precise value of a single electron’s charge

1801 and 1927, respectively - Young, Davisson and Germer on the wavelike nature of light and electrons

1966 – Robert Paine on the disproportionate impact of keystone species on ecosystems

The details of each @ The Top 10 Science Experiments of All Time | DiscoverMagazine.com

Penicillin, the integrated circuit, the internet, I could go on and on.

 

[OldBiologist]

I have my personal favorite. Before I retired, I met a researcher at the NIH who did an elegantly simple experiment that, at that time, was startling. I had an appointment to meet with her and she kept excusing herself for phone calls. I asked her if it was a bad time, that I could reschedule. She said no, she just had to do some brief interviews. I asked her if she was hiring new staff and she said no, it was interviews with the press.

She said she was getting calls from all over the world following news releases from her institute and the NIH. This is what she did.

She took brain tissue from 10 women at autopsy who had died from leukemia. The brains, other than having been subjected to chemotherapeutic agents, and bone marrow transplant protocols, were otherwise normal. She used molecular biology techniques to investigate those tissues with a Y chromosome specific probe.

In every single woman who had received a bone marrow donation from a male, they had functioning neurons with Y chromosomes. This showed two things which were big news at that time.

1. There were cells present in normal adult blood that could differentiate into something as sophisticated as a functioning neuron.

2. The human brain is adding new neurons even as an adult.

Cool stuff.

Discover always comes up with interesting articles. I’m sure there are others, but these 10 seem to top any list.

3rd Century BC – Eratosthenes measures the world.

1628 – William Harvey discovers blood circulation

1855-1863 – Gregor Mendel experiments with the fundamental rules of genetic inheritance

1665-1666- Isaac Newton on the nature of colors and light (thought it was going to be the apple thing?)

1887 – Michelson and Morley Whiff on the way light moves

1898 – Marie Curie defines radioactivity

1890s – 1900s – Ivan Paval on the discovery of conditioned reflexes

1909 – Robert Milikan determines the precise value of a single electron’s charge

1801 and 1927, respectively - Young, Davisson and Germer on the wavelike nature of light and electrons

1966 – Robert Paine on the disproportionate impact of keystone species on ecosystems

The details of each @ The Top 10 Science Experiments of All Time | DiscoverMagazine.com

 

[Frannie]

I have my personal favorite. Before I retired, I met a researcher at the NIH who did an elegantly simple experiment that, at that time, was startling. I had an appointment to meet with her and she kept excusing herself for phone calls. I asked her if it was a bad time, that I could reschedule. She said no, she just had to do some brief interviews. I asked her if she was hiring new staff and she said no, it was interviews with the press.

She said she was getting calls from all over the world following news releases from her institute and the NIH. This is what she did.

She took brain tissue from 10 women at autopsy who had died from leukemia. The brains, other than having been subjected to chemotherapeutic agents, and bone marrow transplant protocols, were otherwise normal. She used molecular biology techniques to investigate those tissues with a Y chromosome specific probe.

In every single woman who had received a bone marrow donation from a male, they had functioning neurons with Y chromosomes. This showed two things which were big news at that time.

1. There were cells present in normal adult blood that could differentiate into something as sophisticated as a functioning neuron.

2. The human brain is adding new neurons even as an adult.

Cool stuff.

Discover always comes up with interesting articles. I’m sure there are others, but these 10 seem to top any list.

3rd Century BC – Eratosthenes measures the world.

1628 – William Harvey discovers blood circulation

1855-1863 – Gregor Mendel experiments with the fundamental rules of genetic inheritance

1665-1666- Isaac Newton on the nature of colors and light (thought it was going to be the apple thing?)

1887 – Michelson and Morley Whiff on the way light moves

1898 – Marie Curie defines radioactivity

1890s – 1900s – Ivan Paval on the discovery of conditioned reflexes

1909 – Robert Milikan determines the precise value of a single electron’s charge

1801 and 1927, respectively - Young, Davisson and Germer on the wavelike nature of light and electrons

1966 – Robert Paine on the disproportionate impact of keystone species on ecosystems

The details of each @ The Top 10 Science Experiments of All Time | DiscoverMagazine.com

This comes back to fully understanding DNA, the amount of which understanding is fully unknown

 

[james bond]

You ain't seen nothing yet.

 

[Fort Fun Indiana]

Penicillin

Right. That's gotta be number one.

 

[westwall]

Penicillin

Right. That's gotta be number one.

Air conditioning has saved more lives.

 

[Fort Fun Indiana]

Penicillin

Right. That's gotta be number one.

Air conditioning has saved more lives.

Ha, I think That's debatable.

 

[westwall]

Penicillin

Right. That's gotta be number one.

Air conditioning has saved more lives.

Ha, I think That's debatable.

It's not even close. Air conditioning has extended the lives of seniors by decades. They are the most susceptible to disease and temp variance whole system crashes.

 

[Fort Fun Indiana]

It's not even close. Air conditioning has extended the lives of seniors by decades.

A life extended by 5 minutes or 1000 years is still but one life saved.

Penicillin by a long shot.

 

[longknife]

Penicillin

Right. That's gotta be number one.

Actually, using molds to treat wounds goes back before the Greeks. American Indian healers used mold with spider web to treat open wounds.