Science's 10 Most Beautiful Physics Experiments

check out the source for descriptions and animations of the experiments.

clipped from physics-animations.com   Robert P. Crease, a member of the philosophy department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory, recently asked physicists to nominate the most beautiful experiment of all time. Based on the paper of George Johnson in The New York Times we list below 10 winners of this polling and accompany the short explanations of the physical experiments with computer animations.   1. Double-slit electron diffraction 2. Galileo's experiment on falling objects 3. Millikan's oil-drop experiment 4. Newton's decomposition of sunlight with a prism 5. Young's light-interference experiment 7. Eratosthenes' measurement of the Earth's circumference 8. Galileo's experiments with rolling balls down inclined planes 9. Rutherford's discovery of the nucleus 10. Foucault's pendulum