When Science Was Young

Books | Review of: The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments

By JEREMY AXELROD
April 11, 2008

Once upon a time, those clever enough to make scientific discoveries could make them from home, the designs elaborate but the tools more or less familiar: scalpels, scales, beakers, Bunsen burners, and, here and there, an electric current. Now not only the instruments but the language of science have shot far beyond our common frame of reference. Above any rooftop telescope floats Hubble, some 350 miles out of reach. This sea-change is hardly lost on George Johnson, a New York Times science writer who reflects in "The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments" (Knopf, 208 pages, $22) that "science in the twenty-first century has become industrialized" — experiments today are bogglingly specialized and tremendously costly, often relying on supercomputers to funnel vast stores of data into meaningful conclusions. The romance of "a single mind confronting the unknown" has yielded to well-organized teams of researchers, whose leaders may snag headlines, but never discoveries, on their own.

With "The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments," Mr. Johnson revisits the more tangible and evocative ingenuities that have swept aside, if only a little, the curtains of our universe. (The book was inspired by a similar list in Physics World magazine.)

But how to choose? "Ideally," Mr. Johnson muses, "the apparatus itself would be a thing of beauty, with polished wood, brass, shining black ebonite. More important would be the beauty of the design and the execution, the cleanness of the lines of thought." Mr. Johnson is out for elegance — not the experiments that wrestle with reality but those that waltz with it. Yet while his criteria circle the graceful process more than the probing results, each experiment's final insights remain crucial. After all, elegance lies where the complex is tamed into the effortless, its elliptical details suddenly comprehensive and even simplified. The beauty of an experiment, then, can be measured by how much of the world it draws into harmony, like a messy love affair that suddenly sparkles within the fleet pentameter of a sonnet.

No matter how outdated the experiment, Mr. Johnson writes breathlessly toward its outcome; each chapter is a séance of scientific reasoning. The handheld, earthbound parameters of early experiments hardly diminished the discoveries that once lay waiting to be sprung from them. Galileo discovered the inverse square law of gravity by timing the races of bronze balls down wooden grooves; Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier discovered oxygen and its everyday role in fire by burning mercury in a flask shaped like a flamingo. Among the cosmic windfall that Isaac Newton yielded in his mid-20s — including calculus, three laws of motion, and universal gravitation — Mr. Johnson is most concerned with the prisms Newton used to refract vibrant ribbons of color in the gloom of his farmhouse. It was pretty, but it also proved that there was a spectrum in sunlight whose laws had until then hid, quite literally, in plain sight.

Progress demands not only an experiment that asks the right questions but one which yields a series of striking results that lodge, burr-like, in a traditional understanding of the world. By resurrecting the contemporary mind-set, Mr. Johnson makes available the sheer creativity and perceptiveness of those scientists who saw past the dogged reasoning of their peers; he restores a sense that the knowledge we take for granted today was once nested in adventure (as far as these affairs go) and uncertainty.

As a science journalist, Mr. Johnson is a seasoned translator of technical jargon. He also has a sharp eye for human plot, both in and out of the laboratory: We learn how Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction, but also how Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's fetching 28-year-old daughter, used to tantalize Faraday — a married, middle-aged Christian — with countless fan letters offering "aid": "my wand is yours at pleasure, & into your hands I deliver it for your use." Some of this emphasis on the individual lies in Mr. Johnson's choice of period and circumstance — nothing past the early 20th century — but there is also his conviction that if you are to find art in science, then you will find it rippling from a single personality.

Unfortunately, Mr. Johnson rarely reflects on the actual beauty of these experiments so much as he explains their process and ingenuity, and so — elegance be damned — a reader hardly knows what to make of the book's title after realizing that two of the 10 chapters feature the evisceration of small animals.

Beauty aside, a certain spirit of wonder breathes through Mr. Johnson's chapters, each of which is a portrait not only of great science but of the inspiration that compels great scientists. He opens with Einstein's boyhood recollection of a turning compass needle, which, Einstein wrote, "made a deep and lasting impression on me. ... Something deeply hidden had to be behind things." It has never been said of any major scientist that from his early childhood he loved playing with uranium and stadium-sized particle accelerators. The half-seen life of science in the world around us, that sensual immediacy brushing against the hidden and infinite, is what drives the chalk to the blackboard, or at least what drives the rest of us to read about it.

Mr. Axelrod is an editor of Contemporary Poetry Review. He has contributed to Parnassus, New Partisan, and other publications.