Did you get your physics education in high school or university? I only had to take one physics class in the USA at college for my major, quantum electrodynamics for electrical engineering but my professor wrote the textbook and I recall he went over each experiment starting from the fundamentals of our understanding of the basics of the atom, Newton's understanding of light at the time, double slit experiment, to Maxwell's equations, the Michelson Morley ether experiment, to deriving then proving experimentally proving general relativity and decomposing GR into Newtonian physics/other laws of electromagnetism, I am still in awe at the people just figuring this stuff out from first principles.

Anyways, I haven't read this (have it on hold at my library) but someone recommended this book on reddit How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for Our Universe, from the Origins of Atoms to the Big Bang https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780385545655

I read Chasing the Molecule by John Buckingham recently and thoroughly enjoyed it! It give a good outline of the history of modern chemistry in a way that felt accessible but still thorough.

It also does a great job of explaining the different characters and their stories. Some little-known who moved chemistry forwards in profound ways, and others, very well-known, who through their loyalty to false theories ended up holding it back.

It's also a pretty short book when helps make it feel accessible.

Discovering the quantization of the charge of electrons sounds like something you'd be interested in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment

We did it with several hundred volts (DC, scary) in college and it was pretty fun collecting the data and watching the numbers fall out in excel doing the analysis.

So very true. The greatest science teachers understand the power that comes with the stories of scientific discovery.

Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and some of Richard Feynman’s best lectures come to mind as some of the most memorable examples, but I’m certain all the best teachers out there know to incorporate the historical and human aspects to bring the essential perspective and natural mnemonic anchors to otherwise “dry” subjects.

As part of 9th grade biology we had to read "Microbe Hunters". The grades ahead insisted that it was awful and boring but I devoured the whole thing in a weekend. So thankful that it was part of the curriculum.

How we derived the laws and theories is science. (Some of the other commenters are mixing this together with biographies of the scientists, which is not science but is sometimes interesting in its own right.) The laws and theories in isolation are just trivia, and any class that teaches just those cannot truthfully be called a science class. Demand a better education.

I highly recommend this book! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25238350-the-hunt-for-vu...

When I was a tutor, mostly doing math, when it came to polynomials and that range, I would trick my students into deriving the quadratic equation. It's not even a full page. Almost all of them finished with a strange expression, and then we had the little "it was always there, waiting for someone to find it" chat.

Some people care about the history, some don't. I find when people talk about astrophysics stuff, most of them do not know the history and ought to, because most of their interpretations fall into the "Yes, that was a question in the 1960s but eventually ..."

If you want one for relativity, I strongly suggest Was Einstein Right? by Clifford Will. It dates from 1986, so it is nearly forty years behind now, but it covers the many experiments and tests of relativities special and general.

I always appreciate these stories about how very specific observations that most people would miss can give away far deeper details of the universe that many wouldn't even consider. Eratosthenes using shadows and figuring out the size of the earth within a few percent is another well known one.

My question exactly.. I hope someone can chime in :)

EDIT: Thinking a bit more... I suppose it's a reasonable assumption that the molecules (mostly) wouldn't stack on top of each other. They all want to get lower and perhaps the resistance to the oil spreading out is much lower proportionately that the gravitational force encouraging the oil to flatten

There is always more to the story:

https://www.scribd.com/document/661270387/My-Work-with-Milli... Fletcher & Millikan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-uWaEvXqbA

How can you make sure you don't end up with 2e as a result? (Or any other multiple)

Blog post seems to have elided this point, but it did link the original paper which was quite short: https://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gold/pdfs/teaching/old_lite...

Rayleigh's experiment was actually trying to solve for the minimum thickness of oil required to stop some camphor shavings from moving around on the water. He never states it explicitly, but I think the assumption is that the minimum thickness required to stop the shavings' movement would be such that the oil volume 'just' covers the surface, ie. is 1 molecule thick everywhere and hence the shavings never touch water. I think he's specifically making a slightly more clever point about surface tension, but that's a little beyond me.

It feels intuitive that a thin fluid on a low-friction surface (like water) would spread out "as much as possible" given enough time. There certainly may be confounding factors, but it seems like a reasonable thing to pin as an "assumption" in a hypothesis. I.e. he didn't have to "know" - assumptions are OK, and I don't feel like this one is huge.

Agreed. The experiment actually gives an upper limit on the size of a molecule in one particular dimension. Still a very useful result.

Scientists frequently have to make assumptions in order to make progress.

Famous example is Darwin figured out that traits are inheritable by natural selection, and this is the driving force of evolution, without having any concept of the physical nature of DNA, or how genes could change (eg. by DNA mutation) to develop adaptations and thus make an organism more fit.

If there were multiple layers of molecules then the film would spread out over a wider area. With repeated experiments it would be clear that films are always an integer multiple of this thickness and never thinner.

Perhaps at the time it was sufficient to define "molecule of oil" as "the height of the amount when spread maximally across the surface of water", and it just so happens that height is only 1 actual molecule

> How did he know that the film of oil was one molecule thick?

He didn't. It was an assumption

I don't think many people today would be able to propose the Michelson Morley experiment and then actually do it. It was truly heoric (and Michelson was a genius).

We did this oil/water experiment in freshman physics or chemistry lab. It was rushed, everybody just did the minimum, the teachers barely explained any of it, and then we moved on.

Experiments are HARD. There is a joke among physicists that theoreticians are washed up by 35 but experimentalists don't even get started until 45.

To make a physics experiment work you have to be ridiculous about recording details and have a strong intuition. You have to design the experiment such that you can differentiate between "hypothesis wrong" and "equipment doesn't work" because you don't know the answer.

(For example: When they turned on LIGO for the first time, they almost immediately caught a great event. Huge victory party, right? Nope. They promptly ignored it assuming that something was wrong with the machine. And it was only after significant post analysis and correlation that they decided that it was a real event.)

That's a bit harsh. To give one counterexample, the Michelson-morley experiment put the figurative nail in the coffin of centuries of speculation about the "luminiferous aether". The experimental apparatus was a table-sized precision carved slab of sandstone floating in a huge vat of mercury, holding the highest precision optical equipment of the day. I suspect it cost rather more than $100 even in the 1880s.

By 1870 pi was known to several hundred decimal digits, for something like this calculation where you have other large sources of error Archimedes approximation from 2 millennia earlier would probably be fine. (<1% error)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_computation_of...

YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RST_ylwVrUw&t=1m27s

Yes, we did it in physics at school too, when we were 13 or 14 I think.

Thank Knuth for TeX or good scientific typesetting would be a nice thing the Victorians had.

The actual manuscript from Rayleigh [1] explains it better: the area is the entire area of the vessel the oil was placed in, and the thing actually being measured was how much oil was required for it cover the whole area.

[1] https://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gold/pdfs/teaching/old_lite...

He used a fixed area (a 33 inch diameter bowl) and measured the weight of oil required to just about calm the entire water. That turned out to be 0.81 milligrams.

Some powder is added to the water, which covers the surface of the water but not the oil patch (which is circular). Then the oil patch diameter is measured.