My favorite is Foucault's pendulum. I was fortunate enough to go to a school which has one. I would spend an inordinate amount of time watching the earth rotate back in middle school. My assignment, should I choose to accept it, is to ensure that I teach K about all of these experiments. The following list is from the New York Times:
Perhaps I can get our local government to erect a pendulum?
- Young's double-slit experiment applied to the interference of single electrons
- Galileo's experiment on falling objects
- Millikan's oil-drop experiment
- Newton's decomposition of sunlight with a prism
- Young's light-interference experiment
- Cavendish's torsion-bar experiment
- Eratosthenes' measurement of the Earth's circumference
- Galileo's experiments with rolling balls down inclined planes
- Rutherford's discovery of the nucleus
- Foucault's pendulum
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