The 'experiment' that fascinates you most!

[Fatima Martin]

Young's double-slit experiment applied to the interference of single electrons

Neither Newton nor Young was quite right about the nature of light. Though it is not simply made of particles, neither can it be described purely as a wave. In the first five years of the 20th century, Max Planck and then Albert Einstein showed, respectively, that light is emitted and absorbed in packets -- called photons. But other experiments continued to verify that light is also wavelike.

It took quantum theory, developed over the next few decades, to reconcile how both ideas could be true: photons and other subatomic particles -- electrons, protons, and so forth -- exhibit two complementary qualities; they are, as one physicist put it, ''wavicles.''

To explain the idea, to others and themselves, physicists often used a thought experiment, in which Young's double-slit demonstration is repeated with a beam of electrons instead of light. Obeying the laws of quantum mechanics, the stream of particles would split in two, and the smaller streams would interfere with each other, leaving the same kind of light- and dark-striped pattern as was cast by light. Particles would act like waves.

According to an accompanying article in Physics Today, by the magazine's editor, Peter Rodgers, it wasn't until 1961 that someone (Claus Jönsson of Tübingen) carried out the experiment in the real world.

By that time no one was really surprised by the outcome, and the report, like most, was absorbed anonymously into science. (Ranking: 1,)

Whether they are blasting apart subatomic particles in accelerators, sequencing the genome or analyzing the wobble of a distant star, the experiments that grab the world's attention often cost millions of dollars to execute and produce torrents of data to be processed over months by supercomputers. Some research groups have grown to the size of small companies.

But ultimately science comes down to the individual mind grappling with something mysterious. When Robert P. Crease, a member of the philosophy department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory, recently asked physicists to nominate the most beautiful experiment of all time, the 10 winners were largely solo performances, involving at most a few assistants. Most of the experiments -- which are listed in this month's Physics World -- took place on tabletops and none required more computational power than that of a slide rule or calculator.

What they have in common is that they epitomize the elusive quality scientists call beauty. This is beauty in the classical sense: the logical simplicity of the apparatus, like the logical simplicity of the analysis, seems as inevitable and pure as the lines of a Greek monument. Confusion and ambiguity are momentarily swept aside, and something new about nature becomes clear.

[fatema zaki]

After reading this article i went and searched more on quantum theeory. i found out that these two small words can have so many meanings.
one of it is quantum mechanism which is explained above it is the wave–particle duality of energy and matter and the uncertainty principle provide a unified view of the behavior of photons, electrons and other atomic-scale objects.
the founder of this theory is max plankh.