Call For Blog Posts

I should probably be leaving this one for Greta, who has written a book on the history of psychology, but I think a pretty good case could be made for Shepard and Metzler's 1971 experiment on mental rotation. It demonstrated that the amount of time it took to determine if two three-dimensional objects were identical was proportional to how far one of the objects was rotated compared to the other. This suggests that the way we decide if one object is the same as another is to mentally rotate one object so that the two mental representations overlap, then compare them.

The experiment blew a hole in the behaviorist dictum that we can't ever understand what's going on in the mind, and led to a blossoming of new research in cognitive psychology. Now literally thousands of experiments offer converging evidence that we can understand not just observable behavior, but also how we think.

In chemistry, it's really hard to come up with the Best Experiment Ever, just because there are so very many experiments, and a reasonably high proportion that are fairly clever. So, how do you choose between Lavoisier's isolation of oxygen (which undermines the phlogiston-based explanations people were futzing with and lays the groundwork for the modern concept of chemical elements); or the Walden inversion (1896) which transformed l-malic acid to d-chlorosuccinic acid to d-malic acid to l-chlorosuccinic acid bact to l-malic acid (whew!) and gave organic chemists a good test of their mechanistic explanations; or any of a number of cool syntheses (Bucky-balls? Silly Putty?); or (dear to my heart) the Belousov-Zhabotinskii reaction, which was instrumental in demonstrating that chemical oscillations in closed systems were NOT impossible, and which gave a good kick-start to the study of far-from-equilibrium dynamics and thermodynamics.

Any chemist who tells you "X is the Best Chemistry Experiment ever" is playing favorites -- like deciding which of his or her offspring s/he loves best. Not to say people don't do this kind of thing -- just that I won't.

(Unless, of course, I think of the experiment in chemistry that really is the best, and then I'll be back.)

In chemistry, it's really hard to come up with the Best Experiment Ever, just because there are so very many experiments, and a reasonably high proportion that are fairly clever.

Oh, absolutely. The same is true in physics-- there are a hgue number of great experiments out there, and any "best of" list is necessarily a matter of opinion.

I'm just curious as to what people's opinions are.

Yeah, Chris Mooney and I are kind of tough to peg, aren't we? We're not scientists with a field. We're really more like the ScienceBlogs' gossip columnists or op-ed writers. Hell, I don't know what to ask me either.

Yeah, Chris Mooney and I are kind of tough to peg, aren't we? We're not scientists with a field. We're really more like the ScienceBlogs' gossip columnists or op-ed writers. Hell, I don't know what to ask me either.

I suppose you'd be free to suggest a favorite expeiment from any science. Or maybe a favorite science policy decision ("The 1901 act creating the National Bureau of Standards totally rocked...").

I nominate Nusslein-Volhard and Wieschaus' systematic mutagenesis of the fruit fly as the greatest experiment of developmental biology.

A good complexity theory blog (theory of CS) is http://weblog.fortnow.com/ By Lance Fortnow...

Like any field with "Science" in its name, Compter Science isn't a science. There have many clever and important innovations (eg packet switching, programming languages, bump mapping), but it isn't an experimental science.

I'll have mine up tomorrow. I'm still trying to make up my mind about how broadly or narrowly to answer (all of anthro...cultural...archaeology...forensics...paleo...).

for the record i wouldn't say i'm a scientist either. i have a biochemistry degree, and have a lot of course work in genetics, and plan to pursue grad work in evolutionary genetics at some point....

razib: for the record i wouldn't say i'm a scientist either. i have a biochemistry degree, and have a lot of course work in genetics, and plan to pursue grad work in evolutionary genetics at some point....

I probably could've phrased that better, but it was an idea that struck me on my lunch break, and I posted it pretty quickly. The point was not so much to appeal to credentialed expertise, as to try to use the topic as a way to get a little cross-linking going on.

I mean, if we're going to share a Web host, we might as well get to know each other...

And, for that matter, I'd be interested to see some "Greatest Experiment" lists from people on other blog hosts. I enjoy reading that stuff, even when it's not my field.

Lambert: Like any field with "Science" in its name, Compter Science isn't a science.

I agree completely. It's more of a cross between math and engineering, but there are some social similarities... and Chad asked...

Speaking as someone who is both a computer scientist and an engineer, it's not engineering. It's also not strictly math nor a science.

At best, it occupies the same position with respect to mathematics as electrical engineering occupies with respect to physics. But generally, it is its own thing.

As such, there is no "best experiment" for computer science, unless you want to poach from the physicists and steal a quantum computation experiment... in about five to seven years. Best papers would (to reveal my biases) probably be Turing's and Church's independent papers on the Halting Problem, and Cook's definition of NP-Completeness.

OK, I just read about two of Benjamin Franklin's experiments (on monologist Josh Kornbluth's blog), and given that BF's 300 birthday is this week, and that they're cool experiments, I thought I'd toss them into contention. Quoting Josh:

And I promise I wont go on much further about Ben, but my father-in-law, who is himself a great scientist, loves to talk about two of Franklins lesser-known scientific experiments. In the first, he wanted to find out whether different colors absorb different amounts of heat so he placed several strips of paper, of different colors, in the snow on a sunny winters day. Sure enough, the differently colored paper strips absorbed different amounts of heat from the sun: the proof was that the ones that had absorbed more heat had melted further down into the snow. In the other experiment, Franklin wanted to determine the exact width of a molecule. So he poured a bit of oil in a French pond and waited for it to completely spread out on top of the water, figuring that its ultimate thickness would be that of one molecule. (Okay, I admit Im kind of lost here myself but the guy sitting next to me at dinner last night confirmed that Franklins measurement was incredibly close to being accurate.)

I'm (also) not a professional scientist (nor a professional or scientist) of any kind but, in reading the "picks," I'm impressed that no one has mentioned one
that I thought was deserving.

My pick is neither a theory nor an experiment but, nonetheless, a true scientific breakthrough: the observation of the differential adsorption of complex fractions in organic materials on various substrate media:
the phenomenon from which has arisen the entire field of chromatographic separation (and analysis) and including the electrophoretic sub-category.

The original observations were all the more remarkable in that one guy deduced the principle when he tried to store
alcohol-extracted plant pigments in blotting paper and noticed various spots; at almost the same time, another man attributed different colors of several types in different geological strata to a process involving the same basic phenomenon. The practical analytical world hasn't been the same since and today, the various types of separation techniques are routinely coupled with other analytical, sensing, and computational devices in such profusion as would certainly astound either of the two originators.