List mania

Abstract

“Science in the 21st century has become industrialized,” writes George Johnson in the introduction to his new book The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments. “The experiments so often celebrated in the newspapers – sequencing the genome, proving the existence of the top-quark, discovering a new planet by analyzing the wobble of a distant star – cost millions of dollars,” he continues. “They generate terabytes of data to be analyzed by supercomputers…[and] are carried out by research teams that have grown to the size of corporations.” But, Johnson then points out, until very recently the most earthshaking science came from individual pairs of hands. His book pays tribute to those hands and the minds that guided them.