Beautiful Experiments News Today

Which direction would an S-shaped lawn sprinkler rotate if it were submerged and the flow were reversed? Experiments now provide a definitive answer.

For a Yale University Art Gallery show, artist Mickalene Thomas curates a selection of historical and contemporary artworks featuring Black sitters.

Hal Foster on The Anti-Aesthetic

In this extract from the new book Beautiful Experiments: An Illustrated History of Experimental Science, science writer Philip Ball explains how Isaac Newton transformed our understanding of light.

In the extract below taken from Beautiful Experiments: An Illustrated History of Experimental Science (The University of Chicago Press, 2023), Philip Ball dives into the 17th and 18th century experiments that sought to figure out the answer to a fundamental question: What induces eggs to develop?

This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognizes the development of quantum dots, particles whose size controls their color, making them useful for technologies such as displays.

Two or more linear defects can twist around one another to form an entity that may affect the properties of a material.

Hal Foster on The Anti-Aesthetic

THE NOTION OF POSTMODERNISM was once a great stimulant to art and thought; today, it feels like another anti-aphrodisiac of the just past. In some ways, postmodernism seems more historical than modernism, reanimated as modernism is by questions of colonialism, diaspora, and globality. On the other hand, this untimeliness makes the present a good moment to look back at postmodernism, if only to measure our distance from it.The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, which I edited, was publ...

Experiments with coin-sized plastic disks have uncovered an unexpected packing behavior in which the disks form randomly oriented stacks.