Category: Physics experiments

The list below is believed complete, though membership – like everything here – is subject to revision.

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.
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.
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.
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.