Inter­ested in find­ing “the most beau­ti­ful physics exper­i­ment of all time”, Robert P. Crease (a mem­ber of the phi­los­o­phy depart­ment at the State Uni­ver­sity of New York and the his­to­rian at Brookhaven National Lab­o­ra­tory) asked physi­cist to nom­i­nate their favourites.

The New York Times duly com­piled the results, but rather than vis­it­ing their un-scannable list, here are the results with links to the appro­pri­ate Wikipedia page:

  1. Young’s double-slit exper­i­ment applied to the inter­fer­ence of sin­gle electrons
  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
  6. Cavendish’s torsion-bar 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