Top 10 Experiments

The most beautiful experiment in physics, according to a poll of Physics World readers, is the interference of single electrons in a Young's double slit.

The list below shows the top 10 most frequently mentioned experiments by readers of Physics World.

Top 10 beautiful experiments:

1 Young's double-slit experiment applied to the interference of single electrons
2 Galileo's experiment on falling bodies (1600s)
3 Millikan's oil-drop experiment (1910s)
4 Newton's decomposition of sunlight with a prism (1665-1666)
5 Young's light-interference experiment (1801)
6 Cavendish's torsion-bar experiment (1798)
7 Eratosthenes' measurement of the Earth's circumference (3rd century BC)
8 Galileo's experiments with rolling balls down inclined planes (1600s)
9 Rutherford's discovery of the nucleus (1911)
10 Foucault's pendulum (1851)

Others experiments that were cited included:

Archimedes' experiment on hydrostatics
Roemer's observations of the speed of light
Joule's paddle-wheel heat experiments
Reynolds's pipe flow experiment
Mach & Salcher's acoustic shock wave
Michelson-Morley measurement of the null effect of the ether
Röntgen's detection of Maxwell's displacement current
Oersted's discovery of electromagnetism
The Braggs' X-ray diffraction of salt crystals
Eddington's measurement of the bending of starlight
Stern-Gerlach demonstration of space quantization
Schrödinger's cat thought experiment
Trinity test of nuclear chain reaction
Wu et al.'s measurement of parity violation
Goldhaber's study of neutrino helicity
Feynman dipping an O-ring in water