 Random House Audio presents The 10 Most Beautiful Experiments by George Johnson Read For You by Dion Graham When Albert Einstein was an old man and sat down to write a short volume of autobiographical notes, something like my own obituary, he remembered the day his father showed him a compass. Turning it this way and that, the boy watched in wonder as the needle pointed insistently north. I can still remember, or at least believe I can remember, that this experience made a deep and lasting impression upon me. Einstein wrote, Something deeply hidden had to be behind things. Prologue On a clear winter morning several years ago, I drove up the hill to St. John's College to play with electrons. I'd recently met the president of the school, which has nestled in the splendid isolation of the Santa Fe foothills, and was impressed to learn that the students, as part of their studies in the humanities, were expected to re-enact the famous experiment of 1909 in which Robert Millican isolated and measured these fundamental particles, showing them to be bits of electricity. St. John's, like its sister college in Annapolis, pursues a classical curriculum, with physics starting around 600 BC with the pre-socratic philosophers. That was when Thales of Miletus made the first stab at a grand unified theory. Everything is made of water. Today, he would probably be working on super-strings. Thales had also noticed that a rock called magnetite, found in the province of Magnesia, exerted an invisible pole on metal, and that rubbing a piece of amber, a substance the Greeks called electron, gave it a mysterious charge. It attracted pieces of straw and chaff. More than two thousand years later, William Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth I's physician, noted that glass rubbed with silk became amberized, electrified. He was the first to use the term. And that other materials could also be enlivened this way. Friction, Gilbert speculated, heated some kind of watery humor, giving rise to a sticky, vaporous effluvium of charge. A French chemist, Charles François du Cistané du Fay, went on to discover that rubbed amber, repelled objects that rubbed glass, attracted. Electricity, he concluded, must come in two forms, resinous and vitreous. Something deeply hidden lay behind things. Millican found a way to get a grip. Sample complete. Ready to continue?