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The history of natural science is full of experiments worthy of names are strange. The dozen described below is selected entirely to taste author, with whom you can disagree. Some of the experiments that fell into this selection ended in nothing. Others led to the emergence of new branches of science. There are experiments begun many years ago, but not finished so far. Newton’s Jumps As a Child Isaac Newton (1643-1727) grew up a rather frail and sickly boy. In games on in the open air, he usually lagged behind peers. September 3rd 1658 Oliver Cromwell, an English revolutionary, died briefly became the sovereign ruler of the country. This day over England an unusually strong wind swept through. The people said: this is the devil himself flew behind the usurper’s soul! But in the town of Grantham, where at that time Newton lived, the children started a long jump competition. Noticing that jumping better in the wind than against him, Isaac jumped all rivals. He later engaged in experiments: recorded how many feet manages to jump in the wind, how much – against the wind and what range he can jump on a calm day. So he got An idea of wind power expressed in feet. Already becoming famous to scientists, he said that he considered these jumps to be his first experiments. Newton is known as a great physicist, but his first the experiment can be attributed rather to meteorology. CONCERT ON RAILS There was a reverse case: a meteorologist conducted an experiment, who proved the validity of one physical hypothesis. Austrian physicist Christian Doppler in 1842 put forward and theoretically substantiated the assumption that the frequency of light and sound vibrations should vary for the observer depending on whether light source or sound from or to the observer. In 1845 Dutch meteorologist Christopher Bays Ballot decided to check Doppler hypothesis. He hired a steam train with a loading platform, landed to the platform of two trumpeters and asked them to hold a note of salt (two the trumpeter was needed so that one of them could gain air, while another draws a note, and thus the sound is not interrupted). On the apron of one half-station between Utrecht and Amsterdam meteorologist placed several musicians without instruments, but with absolute ear for music. After which the engine became at different speeds carry a platform with blowers past the platform with listeners, and those noted what note they hear. Then the observers were forced to ride, and trumpeters played, standing on the platform. The experiments lasted two days, in As a result, it became clear that Doppler was right. By the way, later Base Ballot founded the Dutch weather service, formulated the law of his name (if in the Northern Hemisphere you turn your back on the wind, then the low pressure will be on your left hand) and became foreign Corresponding Member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. THE SCIENCE, BORN AT THE CUP OF TEA One of the founders of biometrics (mathematical statistics for processing biological results experiments) the English botanist Robert Fisher worked in 1910-1914 years at the agrobiological station near London. Collective the staff consisted of men alone, but once they recruited seaweed specialist woman. For her sake, it was decided to establish in the common room fy-o-kloki. At the first tea party, a dispute arose on the eternal theme for England: what is more correct – add milk to tea or pour tea into a cup where there is already milk? Some skeptics began to say that with the same proportion no difference in there’s no taste for the drink, but Muriel Bristol, a new employee, claimed to be easily distinguished by “wrong” tea (English aristocrats consider it right to add milk to tea, not vice versa). In the next room, cooked with the participation of the staff chemist in different ways a few cups of tea and Lady Muriel showed the subtlety of her taste. And Fisher thought: how many times do you need repeat the experiment so that the result can be considered reliable? After all, if there were only two cups, guess the cooking method it was entirely possible by accident. If three or four – an accident also could play a role … From these thoughts was born classic book “Statistical Methods for Researchers”, published in 1925. Fisher’s methods biologists and physicians still used. Note that Muriel Bristol, by the recollections of one of the participants in the tea party, correctly identified all cups. By the way, the reason why in English high society it is customary to add milk to tea, and not vice versa, is associated with physical phenomenon. Know always drank porcelain tea, which can burst, if you first pour cold milk into a cup, and then add hot tea. Ordinary English drank tea from faience or tin mugs without fear for their integrity. HOME MOWGLY In 1931, an unusual experiment was conducted by a family of American biologists – Winthrop and Luella Kellogg. After reading an article about sad the fate of children growing up among animals – wolves or monkeys, biologists thought: what if, on the contrary, try to educate monkey cub in the human family? Would he come close to to man? At first, scientists wanted to relocate with their little son Donald in Sumatra, where it would be easy to be among the orangutans find a companion for Donald, but there wasn’t enough money for that. However The Yale Center for the Study of Humanoid Monkeys lent them a little female chimpanzee called gua. She was seven months old and Donald – 10. The spouses of Kellogg knew that almost 20 years before their experiment Russian researcher Nadezhda Ladygina already I tried to educate how to bring up children, a one-year-old chimp and in three years has not been successful in humanizing. But Ladygin conducted an experiment without the participation of children, and Kellogg hoped that co-education with their son will give other results. Also it could not be ruled out that the one-year-old is already too late for re-education. Gua took into the family and began to educate along with Donald. They liked each other and soon became inseparable. Experimenters recorded every detail: Donald likes the smell spirits, Gua does not love him. Conducted experiments: who will guess faster, how to use a stick to get cookies suspended from the ceiling in the middle rooms on a thread? And if you blindfold the boy and the monkey and call them by name, who better determines the direction from where it comes sound? In both tests, Gua won. But when Donald was given a pencil and paper, he himself began to scribble something on a sheet, and a monkey I had to learn what to do with a pencil. Attempts to bring a monkey to a person under the influence of education were more likely unsuccessful. Although Gua often moved on two legs and learned eat with a spoon, even began to understand a little bit of human speech, she confused when acquaintances appeared in another clothes, she could not be taught to pronounce at least one word – “dad” and she, unlike Donald, could not master a simple a game like our “dummies”. However, the experiment had to be interrupted, when it turned out that by 19 months and Donald did not shine eloquence – he mastered only three words. And worse, desire he began to express a typical monkey sound like eating cracking. Parents were afraid that gradually the boy would go down on all fours, and the human language will never master. And gua sent back to the nursery. DALTON’S EYES It will be about an experiment conducted at the request of the experimenter after his of death. The English scientist John Dalton (1766-1844) is remembered to us in mainly by his discoveries in the field of physics and chemistry, as well as the first a description of congenital visual impairment – color blindness, in which color recognition is broken. Dalton himself noticed that he was suffering this shortcoming only after being carried away in 1790 botany and it turned out that it’s hard for him to understand botanical monographs and qualifiers. When the text was talking about whites or yellow flowers, he had no difficulty, but if the flowers described as purple, pink or dark red, all of them seemed to Dalton indistinguishable from the blue. Often, defining plant as described in the book, the scientist had to ask anyone: is it a blue or pink flower? People thought that he is joking. Dalton was understood only by his brother, who possessed the same hereditary defect. Dalton himself, comparing his color perception with the vision of flowers by friends and acquaintances, decided that there is some kind of blue light filter in his eyes. And bequeathed to his laboratory assistant after death, remove his eyes and check, not stained whether the so-called vitreous body is in bluish color – gelatinous mass filling the eyeball? Laboratory Assistant performed the will of the scientist and did not find anything special in his eyes. is he suggested that dalton might have had something wrong with optic nerves. Dalton’s eyes preserved in a jar of alcohol in Manchester literary and philosophical society, and already in our time, in 1995, genetics isolated and examined DNA from the retina. As expected, genes were found in it color blindness. It is impossible not to mention two very strange experiments. with the human organs of vision. Isaac Newton Cutting from Ivory a thin curved probe, launched it into his eye and pressed them on back side of the eyeball. In this case, color appeared in the eye flashes and circles, from which the great physicist concluded that we see the world around us because light puts pressure on the retina. IN 1928, one of the pioneers of television, the English inventor John Baird, tried to use the human eye as transmitting camera, but naturally failed. REALLY EARTH – BALL? A rare example of an experiment in geography that actually not an experimental science. Outstanding English evolutionary biologist, Darwin’s ally – Alfred Russell Wallace was an active fighter against pseudoscience and all sorts of superstitions (see Science and Life, No. 5, 1997). In January 1870, Wallace read an ad in one scientific journal whose publisher offered a £ 500 dispute to whoever takes clearly prove the sphericity of the Earth and “will demonstrate in a way that is understood by every rational person, a convex iron road, river, canal or lake. “The dispute was proposed by a certain John Hamden, author of a book proving that the Earth is actually a flat disk. Wallace decided to accept the challenge and to demonstrate the curvature of the Earth chose a straight six-mile channel section. In the beginning and in at the end of the stretch were two bridges. On one of them, Wallace installed strictly horizontally 50-fold telescope with sight threads in the eyepiece. In the middle of the canal, three miles from each bridge, it set a tall pole with a black circle on it. To another bridge hung a board with a horizontal black stripe. Height above water the telescope, the black circle and the black bar was completely the same. If the Earth (and the water in the channel) is flat, a black strip and the black circle should coincide in the eyepiece of the telescope. If the surface of the water is convex, repeats the convexity of the Earth, then black the circle should be above the strip. And so it happened (see picture). Moreover, the size of the discrepancy coincided well with the calculated one, derived from the known radius of our planet. However hamden refused to even look through the telescope, sending his Secretary. And the secretary assured the audience that both tags are on the same level. If some discrepancy is observed, then this associated with aberrations of telescope lenses. Followed by many years a lawsuit in which Hamden was still forced to pay £ 500, but Wallace spent on legal fees much bigger. TWO LONGEST EXPERIMENTS Perhaps the longest experiment in the world started 130 years ago (see “Science and life “No. 7, 2001) and is not finished yet. American botanist U. J. Beale in 1879 buried 20 bottles of seeds in the ground common weeds. Since then periodically (at first every five, then ten, and even later every twenty years) scientists dig one bottle and check the seeds for germination. Some Particularly resistant weeds still germinate. Next bottle must get it in the spring of 2020. The longest physical experiment began at the University of the Australian city of Brisbane Professor Thomas Parnell. In 1927 he placed in a fortified a tripod a glass funnel a piece of hard resin – vara, which molecular properties is a liquid, although very viscous. Parnell then heated the funnel so that the var melted and flowed slightly. in the nose of the funnel. In 1938, the first drop of tar fell in Parnell’s glass of beaker. The second fell in 1947 year. In the fall of 1948, the professor passed away, and overseeing the funnel continued by his students. Since then, drops have fallen in 1954, 1962, 1970, 1979, 1988 and 2000. The frequency of drops falling in recent decades has slowed down due to the fact that in the laboratory mounted the air conditioner and it got colder. Curious that never the drop did not fall in the presence of any of the observers. And even when in 2000 a webcam was mounted in front of a funnel for image transmission to the Internet, at the time of the fall of the eighth and on Today the last drop the camera refused! Experience is far from completion, but it’s already clear that the var is one hundred million times more viscous, than water. BIOSPHERE-2 This is the largest experiment of hit our random list. It was decided to make the current model of the terrestrial biosphere. In 1985, more than two hundred American scientists and engineers come together to build in the desert Sonora (Arizona) a huge glass building with earthly samples flora and fauna. They planned to hermetically close the building from any foreign matter and energy (except solar energy light) and put here a team of eight volunteers for two years, who were immediately nicknamed the “Bionauts.” The experiment was supposed to facilitate the study of relationships in the natural biosphere and test the possibility of the continued existence of people in a closed system, for example during long-distance space flights. Supply oxygen should have plants; water was expected to be provided natural cycle and biological self-purification processes, food – by plants and animals. Internal area of the building (1.3 ha) divided into three main parts. The first housed samples of five Earth’s characteristic ecosystems: tropical rainforest section, “ocean” (salt water pool), desert, savannah (with flowing through her “river”) and the swamp. In all these parts selected botanists and zoologists of representatives of flora and fauna. Second part buildings dedicated to life support systems: a quarter hectare for growing edible plants (139 species, including tropical fruits from the “forest”), pools for fish (took tilapia, as unpretentious, fast-growing and tasty look) and the biological compartment sewage treatment. Finally, there were residential compartments for the “Bionauts” (each – 33 square meters with a common dining room and living room). Solar panels provided electricity for computers and night lighting. At the end of September 1991, eight people “walled up” in a glass greenhouse. And soon problems began. The weather turned out to be unusually cloudy, photosynthesis was weaker than normal. In addition, oxygen-consuming bacteria have multiplied in the soil, and over 16 months its content in the air decreased from normal 21% up to 14%. I had to add oxygen from the outside, from the cylinders. The harvest edible plants were lower than calculated, the population of “Biosphere-2” constantly starving (although in November I had to open the grocery NZ, for two years of experience the average weight loss was 13%). Disappeared populated pollinating insects (from 15 to 30% of species are extinct), but cockroaches multiplied, which no one had populated. “Bionauts” nevertheless, they were able to sit in prison for two years, but in general, the experiment was unsuccessful. However, he is once again showed how subtle and vulnerable the mechanisms of the biosphere are, providing our lives. Giant building used Now for individual experiments with animals and plants. BURNING DIAMOND Nowadays, expensive experiments do not surprise anyone. and requiring huge experimental facilities. However 250 years back it was new, so look at the amazing experiences great French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier converged crowds of people (especially since the experiments took place in the fresh air, in garden near the Louvre). Lavoisier investigated the behavior of various substances in high temperatures, for which he built a giant installation with two lenses that concentrated sunlight. To make collective lens with a diameter of 130 centimeters and now the task non-trivial, and in 1772 it was simply impossible. But the optics found a way out: made two round concave glasses, welded them in 130 liters of alcohol were poured between them. The thickness of such a lens in the center was 16 centimeters. The second lens that helped to collect the rays even stronger, it was two times less, and it was made in the usual way – grinding glass castings. This optics installed on a huge special platform (its drawing can be see in Science and Life, 8, 2009). Well thought out leverage propellers and wheels allowed to direct lenses on the Sun. Experience participants were wearing sooty glasses. Lavoisier placed the focus of the system various minerals and metals: sandstone, quartz, zinc, tin, coal, diamond, platinum and gold. He noted that in a hermetically sealed glass vessel with a diamond diamond at it is charred by heating, and burns out in air, completely disappearing. The experiments cost thousands of gold livres.
Water DNA Time Life Bridges Plants Telescope
