Greatest. Experiment. EVER.
Quite a while back, Clifford Johnson at Cosmic Variance had a post seeking nominations for "The Greatest Physics Paper Ever." Back after a long hiatus, he's now holding a vote among five finalists: Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica, Albert Einstein's General Relativity, Emmy Noether's paper on symmetry and conservation laws, Dirac's theory of the electron, and the Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen paper on quantum non-locality.
(Newton's Principia Mathematica had a comfortable lead when I last checked, so if you're a partisan of one of the other candidates, go over there and vote...)
Of course, as some have noted, these are all theory papers. This is a natural result of the overabundance of theory types in blogdom, but it still just doesn't seem right. For most of the history of science, after all, the development of theory has been driven by experimental results, not the other way around.
So here's an attempt to restore the balance. I'm soliciting nominations in comments for the best experimental work in physics. What experiment do you think was the greatest, that is, what is the one experiment that you think did the most to change the field of physics (hopefully for the better)?
Continued at scienceblogs.com...
Posted at 6:50 AM | link | follow-ups |