• Question: What is your favourite experiment and why

    Asked by Henners to Sarah, Connor, Jillian, Lidunka, Steven on 14 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by lolz.megs, poppy.
    • Photo: Connor Macrae

      Connor Macrae answered on 14 Jun 2015:

      If we are talking lab experiments I would have to say I have a bit of a soft spot for quite a simple experiment that shows a phenomena called the ‘Meissner effect’. This experiment involves cooling a type of material called a superconductor with Liquid Nitrogen then placing a magnet on top of it.

      What do you think might happen? well, the magnet will levitate! This happens due to the supercooled superconductor not allowing the magnetic field to pass through it, meaning you can delicately place the magnet in the sweet spot where forces on it will balance, allowing it to float.

      This can be done on a bigger scale to make tracks of magnets on which the cooled superconductor can float along like a levitating train. In fact, this same physics is what is used on Maglev trains in Japan!

    • Photo: Lidunka Vocadlo

      Lidunka Vocadlo answered on 14 Jun 2015:

      Well I’m not an experimentalist, but there are some really fabulous experiments that I have been involved with which squash and heat up iron to extraordinarily high pressures and temperatures and then “look” at the atoms to see where they have gone!

    • Photo: Steven Thomson

      Steven Thomson answered on 14 Jun 2015:

      Picking an absolute favourite experiment is tricky, but one of the best has to be the one that got Einstein a Nobel Prize for figuring out what was happening – it’s called the ‘photoelectric effect’ and was first done by Heinrich Hertz in 1887 but these days it’s done routinely in high school physics classes.

      The photoelectric effect is a simple experiment where shining light with a certain frequency onto a bit of metal leads to the metal emitting electrons – they just jump right off the surface! By carefully studying how many electrons came off the metal and how fast they were going, and by varying the brightness and colour of the light, scientists discovered something amazing – light, which was known to be a wave, also behaved like a particle. Weird, right? It was behaving like two different things at once!

      This simple experiment led to the discovery of something called ‘wave-particle duality’, and from there led to the development of quantum mechanics. That in turn led to transistors, LEDs, superconductors, and the modern world around us. All from someone in 1887 shining a light on a bit of metal and watching what happened. I think that’s amazing!

    • Photo: Jillian Scudder

      Jillian Scudder answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      Probably the double-slit experiment! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

      This experiment proved that light (which we already knew behaves like a particle) also behaves like a wave, and can interfere with itself, like two waves of water cancelling each other out. It’s a super simple experiment, and has such complex outputs!

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