• Question: what was your favourite experiment that you have done

    Asked by anon-217067 to Savannah, Edoardo on 17 Jun 2019. This question was also asked by anon-217072.
    • Photo: Savannah Clawson

      Savannah Clawson answered on 17 Jun 2019:

      Obviously, I love the experiment that I work for now: the ATLAS experiment at CERN https://atlas.cern/ 😉
      .
      When I was in university doing my degree, I did a really cool lab experiment where we used a laser and dimmed it until we only had one particle of light being emitted at a time. We then sent this particle of light through a piece of metal with thin slits cut in it. Even though we were sending one particle through at a time, we could see the particle interact with itself like it was a wave. We were seeing quantum mechanics in action in front of our eyes! This experiment is called Young’s double slit experiment and it demonstrates how light behaves both like a particle and a wave at the same time (this is called the wave-particle duality of light), which is pretty cool!

    • Photo: Edoardo Vescovi

      Edoardo Vescovi answered on 18 Jun 2019: last edited 18 Jun 2019 1:56 pm

      I’m not involved in experiments. Anyway, I like remembering one of the most important and less expensive experiments of history. Einstein predicted in the 1900s-1910s that time slows down at high speed or when gravity is more intense, see also my answer in “what do you think about time travel” on this site. Two scientists, Hafele and Keating, bought precise clocks to test it: some were left home, some got booked seats on airplanes for all-round-world flights. Hard to believe? Check out “Mr. Clock” sitting comfortably on the plane here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafele–Keating_experiment ! When the travelling clocks were compared with the clocks at home, they were found to disagree by millionths of a second as Einstein thought.

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