Great Experiments That Shaped Physics: From Galileo's Falling Bodies to the Higgs Boson, How Ingenio

Every law of physics was once just a guess. Then someone built an experiment - and the universe answered.

A ball rolling down a ramp. A beam of light split by two slits. A sheet of gold foil bombarded with particles. These simple setups shattered entire worldviews and rebuilt physics from the ground up. This book tells the story of how.

Darius Baxter walks you through four centuries of the most ingenious tests ever devised, revealing not just what we know about the universe, but how we came to know it - in clear, vivid language anyone can follow.

Inside, you will discover:

- Galileo's falling bodies - the ramp experiments that overthrew two thousand years of Aristotle
- Newton's prism - how a beam of sunlight in a darkened room revealed the nature of color
- Young's double-slit - the elegant test that proved light is a wave, then later proved it isn't only that
- The gold foil experiment - the shocking result that revealed the atom is mostly empty space
- A famous failure - how Michelson and Morley's null result paved the road to relativity
- The 1919 eclipse - the expedition that bent starlight and made Einstein a legend
- Splitting the atom - the tabletop discovery that changed history forever
- The Higgs and beyond - the Large Hadron Collider, gravitational waves, and the experiments still rewriting physics today

From Faraday's invisible fields to entangled particles and colliding black holes, this is the complete story of the question-askers and the machines they built to interrogate reality - with no equations required.

The universe answers those who ask well. Here are the greatest questions ever posed.