Physics

Stories filed under Physics in the Weird Science History archive — 55 stories from the strange edge of science.

• From Lanterns on Two Hills to Mirrors Left on the Moon: A Short History of Measuring the Speed of Light
• From Ringing Church Bells to Lightning-Rod Hats: A Short History of the Lightning Rod
• The Botanist Who Ground Up a Piece of the Sphinx to See If It Would Wiggle
• The Government Expedition That Tried to Bomb Rain Out of the Texas Sky
• The Inch-Long Shrimp That Drowned Out the Navy's Underwater Microphones — With a Bubble
• The Kaleidoscope Craze That Sold 200,000 in Three Months — and Barely Paid Its Inventor
• The 'Life Energy' Box Einstein Tested for Ten Days — and the Warm Ceiling That Explained It
• The Millionaire Who Declared Gravity 'Enemy Number One' — and Paid Colleges to Put Up Monuments Against It
• The Neurologist Who Built a Bumpy Train Ride You Could Sit In — and the Humming Helmet That Came Next
• The Particle Accelerator That Could Tell When the Train to Paris Left
• The Physicist Who Tried to Bottle a Mountain Fog — and Caught Subatomic Particles Instead
• The Pub Egg Timer That Became the Lava Lamp — and the Inventor Who Said You Wouldn't Need Drugs
• The Roman Doctor Who Prescribed a Live Electric Fish for Your Headache
• The Math Teacher Who Made Ice Out of Sunshine — Until a Report Poured Cold Water on It
• The Bumblebee That Science Supposedly Proved Couldn't Fly
• The Perpetual Motion Machine Secretly Powered by an Old Man Upstairs Eating Bread
• The Physicist Who Cleaned His 40-Foot Spectrograph by Sending the Family Cat Through It
• The Champagne Party Stephen Hawking Threw for Time Travelers — and Sent the Invitations Out Afterward
• The Spotted X-Ray Film That Traced the First Atomic Bomb — Through a Cardboard Box
• The Trumpeters Who Rode a Steam Train Back and Forth to Test a Theory About Stars
• The Baguette Blamed for Overheating the Large Hadron Collider
• The Falling Cat That Seemed to Break the Laws of Physics
• The Spaghetti That Stumped Richard Feynman by Refusing to Break in Two
• The Turkey Benjamin Franklin Tried to Electrocute — and Shocked Himself Instead
• From a Glass Frog Tied to Your Wrist to 98.6: A Short History of the Thermometer
• The Manhole Cover a Nuclear Test Fired Into the Sky — and the Single Camera Frame That Caught It
• The Needle Isaac Newton Slid Behind His Own Eyeball to Find Out Where Color Comes From
• The Six Macaques Given a Keyboard to Write Shakespeare — Who Typed Five Pages of the Letter 'S'
• The Three Safes of Atomic Secrets That All Opened With the Same Number
• The Abbé Who Shocked 200 Monks in a Line a Mile Long to Time the Speed of Electricity
• The Duck Borrowed From a Farm to Prove That Quacks Do Echo
• The Frisbee Salesmen Who Charged a Dollar for an Invisible Wire
• The Loose Cable That Made Neutrinos Outrun Light for Five Months
• The Physicist Who Levitated a Frog — and Then Won a Real Nobel Prize
• The Army Captain Who Asked Congress to Fund a Trip Inside the Earth
• The Truck Driver Who Flew a Lawn Chair to 16,000 Feet on 42 Weather Balloons
• The Cat Who Co-Authored a Physics Paper Because His Owner Used the Word 'We'
• The Cylinder in a Paris Vault That Defined the Kilogram — Until It Started Losing Weight
• The Scientist Who Weighed the Earth but Couldn't Speak to His Housekeeper
• Cold Fusion: The Breakthrough That Wasn't
• Nikola Tesla and the Pigeon He Loved
• The Bathtub That Took 24 Hours to Drain to Test a Myth
• The 'Demon Core': The Plutonium Sphere That Killed Two Scientists
• The Ether-Hunting Machine That Found Nothing — and Broke Physics
• The Experiment So Slow Its Keeper Watched for 52 Years and Never Saw a Single Drop Fall
• The Glow Across the Room That Let Us See Inside the Body
• The Horses That Battled an Army of Electric Eels
• The Motor That Ran for Twenty-Six Years on a Secret Room Full of Compressed Air
• The Park Ranger Struck by Lightning Seven Times
• The Rays 300 Scientists Saw That Were Never There
• The Schoolboy Whose Hot Ice Cream Froze Faster — and Baffled Physicists for 60 Years
• The Shoe-Store X-Ray Machine That Kids Begged to Use
• The Slinky: The Walking Spring That Fell Off a Navy Workbench
• The Superheavy Element That Only Existed in One Scientist's Data
• The Warship That Never Actually Teleported to Norfolk

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