文档介绍：THE TEN MOST
BEAUTIFUL
EXPERIMENTS
E JOHNSON
. $
CANADA $
FROM the acclaimed New York Times science
writer e Johnson, an irresistible book on
the ten most fascinating experiments in the
history of science—moments when a curious
soul posed a particularly eloquent question
to nature and received a crisp, unambiguous
reply.
Johnson takes us to those times when the
world seemed filled with mysterious forces,
when scientists were dazzled by light, by elec-
tricity, and by the beating of the hearts they laid
bare on the dissecting table.
We see Galileo singing to mark time as
he measures the pull of gravity, and Newton
carefully inserting a needle behind his eye to
learn how light causes vibrations in the retina.
William Harvey ties a tourniquet around his
arm and watches his arteries throb above
and his veins bulge below, proving that blood
circulates. Luigi Galvani sparks electrical cur-
rents in dissected frog legs, wondering at the
twitching muscle fibers, and Ivan Pavlov makes
his now-famous dogs salivate at ascending
chord progressions.
For all of them, diligence was rewarded.
In an instant, confusion was swept aside and
something new about nature leaped into view.
In bringing us these stories, Johnson restores
some of the romance to science, reminding us
of the existential excitement of a single soul
staring down the unknown.
THE TEN MOST
BEAUTIFUL
EXPERIMENTS
ALSO BY E JOHNSON
Miss Leavitt's Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman
Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe
A Shortcut Through Time: The Path to the puter
Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and
the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics
Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order
In the Palaces of Memory:
How We Build the Worlds Inside Our Heads
Machinery of the Mind:
Inside the New Science of Artificial Intelligence
Architects of Fear:
Conspiracy Theories and