#18 Beautiful Minds Doing Beautiful Experiments!
Wednesday – 1:00 p.m. Winter Term 2009 (1st 7 weeks)
Coordinator: Carol Saltzman Co-coordinator: Harvey Gold
Course Description
This S/DG could be called ‘Explore and Be Humbled”. We shall study some of the great minds of science and the amazing experiments they created to learn about things they noticed in nature.
Have you ever wondered, like Galvani, whether electricity moves muscles? Have you wondered, like Newton, what causes red to be red and blue to be blue? What is the nature of color? Have you ever wondered, like Pavlov, how we can understand what’s happening inside a dog’s mind by observing her when she sees a bone?
George Johnson, a science writer, and Robert Crease, a historian and philosopher of science, selected our topics. These experiments shattered myths and replaced convoluted theories with new insights that transformed the way we understand the world around us. We shall get a glimpse into the history of science and some of those experiments which have been especially important in bringing us to where we are today. We shall touch on many different fields of science.
Class members choose from the list of men and women with beautiful minds and describe what observations bewildered them and what experiments they did to resolve their questions! Since this is a seven-week S/DG, if we have 14 members, we anticipate each participant’s presentation would be only one hour long. It is not necessary that class participants have a scientific background.
Topics
Participants will choose from the following persons and experiments.
1. Galileo studies motion with his inclined plane experiment and demonstrates how speed varies when objects fall. 1604.1,2
2. William Harvey experiments with the circulation and properties of blood by pinching the veins and arteries of a live snake. 1628.1
3. Isaac Newton grasps the nature of color. By passing colored light rays through two prisms, he shows that white light is a mixture different colored rays and that colored rays aren’t composed of more basic entities. 1666.1,2
4. Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, once he realized combustion involves air, wonders about air’s composition. After heating mercury and mercury oxide and analyzing their products, he separates and characterizes two of the components of air, oxygen and nitrogen. 1775.1
5. Luigi Galvani illuminates the nature of electricity by working with the nerves and muscles of frogs. He shows that organic tissues are capable of generating ‘animal electricity’ and stimulates Volta to build the first battery. 1794.1
6. Michael Faraday proves that magnetism and light are related. By passing polarized light through optical glass and rotating it with a magnet, he finds strong magnetic fields can affect light. 1845.1
7. James Joule shows the relationship between heat and work by measuring how much water was heated when falling weights moved a paddle wheel. He then calculates the ratio between the work done and the heat produced. 1845.1
8. Gregor Mendel explains the development of hybrids and formulates the basic laws of heredity after cultivating and testing pea plants. 1863.
9. A.A. Michelson, using an interferometer, shows the motion of the earth through space has no impact on the speed of light. This led to the refutation of the ether hypothesis and contributed to Einstein’s theory of relativity. 1887.1
10. Ivan Pavlov investigates classical conditioning, the capacity of animals to learn new stimuli and connect them to natural reflexes. By measuring their saliva, he discovers dogs can learn to distinguish ascending and descending musical note patterns. 1907.1
11. Robert Millikan and Harvey Fletcher measure the electric charge of the electron, the first sub-atomic particle identified, by balancing the gravitational and electric forces on tiny charged droplets of oil suspended between two metal electrodes. 1909.1.2
12. Ernest Rutherford discovers the internal structure of the atom by firing alpha particles at thin gold foil and observing that a few are scattered more than 90º. He realizes those few encounter a tiny massive concentration, the atom’s nucleus. 1911.2
13. Lise Meitner explains how the nucleus of an atom can be split into smaller parts after collaborating with Otto Hahn to produce barium from uranium. 1939.
14. Oswald Avery shows that the hereditary material is DNA, not protein. Pneumococci bacteria without protein in their capsules make a cellular feature in the next generation; remove the DNA and they don’t make it. 1944.
15. Barbara McClintock discovers jumping genes that move on and between chromosomes by observing changing patterns of coloration in corn kernels. 1948.
16. Rita Levi-Montalcini discovers a substance that stimulates the growth of nerve cells after observing that a mouse tumor spurs rapid nerve growth in chick embryos. 1953.
17. Harry Harlow provides new understanding of human behavior by working with infant monkeys. He shows the need for interpersonal bonding is more powerful than the need for food in an experiment with cloth and wire surrogate mothers. 1958.
18. John Garcia and Robert Koelling show that what animals learn depends on their biological predisposition.
Rats readily associate taste with nausea but not with light and sound. 1966.
Bibliography
Johnson, George. The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
Crease, Robert P. The Prism and the Pendulum; The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments in Science. New York, Random House, 2003.
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/List-of-famous-experiments
There are numerous biographies, science texts, and web sites with relevant information.
Pre-Meeting: Wednesday, December 10, 2008, 1:00 p.m. |