Category: Experiments

A top-level category of Obscuripedia. The list below is believed complete, though membership – like everything here – is subject to revision.

• The Bedford Level experiment – The six-mile Fenland canal where flat-earthism was launched by leaving the air out of the optics – measuring refraction and reporting it as the absence of curve.
• The double-slit experiment – The experiment that settled whether light is a wave, and is now chiefly cited for a claim about consciousness resting on one word being read as ordinary English.
• The Final Experiment – The December 2024 expedition that took flat-earthers and their critics to Antarctica to watch the Sun decline to set.
• Foucault's pendulum – A weight on a wire that reports the Earth's rotation without reference to the sky, at a rate that goes exactly as the sine of the latitude.
• Michelson–Morley experiment – The 1887 experiment that searched for the aether wind and found, decisively, nothing – the null result the Aetheric Concord predicted and did not survive to claim.
• The Millikan creep – Millikan's charge of the electron was 0.6 per cent low, and every value published after it climbed towards the truth by small steps for decades.
• N-rays – A radiation emitted by almost everything, reported in three hundred papers, and detected throughout by looking at a faint light and deciding it had brightened.
• Newton's bucket – The last of five arguments for absolute space, now quoted alone and in support of the position it opposed.
• The Sagnac effect – The fringe shift from sending light both ways round a rotating loop, offered as the disproof of relativity, and in fact a direct measurement of the relativity of simultaneity.
• The Schiehallion experiment – The 1774 measurement that weighed the Earth by how far a Scottish mountain pulled a plumb-line sideways – and invented the contour map doing it.
• Schrödinger's cat – A thought experiment devised in 1935 to show a reading of quantum mechanics absurd, now the emblem of the reading it was built to ridicule.
• Stellar aberration – The annual tilt of every star by the same 20.5 arcseconds, found by a man hunting parallax, and now cited against the motion that causes it.
• The 21 grams experiment – A bed on beam scales and six dying patients. The number everyone knows comes from one of them, and reached print only because a newspaper got there first.

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