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Aired: Wednesday, April 02, 2008 11-12PM ET
Newton's sketch of his crucial experiment in which light from the sun is refracted through a first prism and its colors refracted in the second prisms. Photo: Warden and Fellows, New College, Oxford |
By host Tom Ashbrook
Science writer George Johnson is in love with the science of the old days -- before super-colliders and supercomputers and terabytes of data to be churned.
When he thinks of the beauty of science, he thinks of the simple, shattering experiments of Galileo and Newton, Pavlov and Faraday.
Until very recently, he says, the most earthshaking science came from a single pair of hands, a single mind confronting the unknown. Astoundingly. Beautifully.
This hour, On Point: George Johnson and the ten most beautiful experiments in the history of science.
| · | George Johnson, science writer for The New York Times, Scientific American, Slate, Wired, Time, and The Atlantic Monthly, and author of "The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments" | | · | Tim Hallman, experimental physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. |
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STAR Experiment at Brookhaven National Labratory
Timothy Hallman and the other 500 or so scientists who make
up the STAR Experiment team have been accelerating gold nuclei at the Brookhaven
National Laboratory’s
Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider [RHIC]. The team is searching
for quark-gluon plasma (QGP), the type of matter postulated to have existed
just microseconds after the Big Bang. And when they succeed, and two gold
nuclei collide nearly head-on at the speed of light, this is the image
that appears on their TV screens in the lab.
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