List of experiments

The following is a list of historically important scientific experiments and observations demonstrating something of great scientific interest, typically in an elegant or clever manner.

Astronomy

* Galileo Galilei uses a telescope to observe that the moons of Jupiter appear to circle Jupiter. This evidence supports the heliocentric model, and weakens the geocentric model of the cosmos (1609)
* Ole Rømer makes the first quantitative estimate of the speed of light in 1676 by timing the motions of Jupiter's satellite Io with a telescope
* Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson detect the cosmic microwave background radiation, giving support to the theory of the Big Bang (1964)
* Kerim Kerimov launches Kosmos 186 and Kosmos 188 as experiments on automatic docking eventually leading to the development of space stations (1967)
* The Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-Z Supernova Search Team discover, by observing Type Ia supernovae, that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating (1998)

Biology

* Robert Hooke, using a microscope, observes cells (1665).
* Anton van Leeuwenhoek discovers microorganisms (1674–1676).
* James Lind, publishes 'A Treatise of the Scurvy' which describes a controlled ship board experiment using two identical populations but with only one variable, the consumption of citrus fruit (1753).
* Edward Jenner tests his hypothesis for the protective action of mild cowpox infection for smallpox, the first vaccine (1796).
* Gregor Mendel's experiments with the garden pea led him to surmise many of the fundamental laws of genetics ( dominant vs recessive genes, the 1–2–1 ratio, see Mendelian inheritance) (1856–1863).
*Charles Darwin demonstrates evolution by natural selection using many examples (1859).
* Louis Pasteur uses S-shaped flasks to prevent spores from contaminating broth. This disproves the theory of Spontaneous generation (1861) extending the rancid meat experiment of Francesco Redi (1668) to the micro scale.
*Charles Darwin and his son Francis, using dark-grown oat seedlings, discover the stimulus for phototropism is detected at the tip of the shoot (the coleoptile tip), but the bending takes place in the region below the tip (1880).
* Emil von Behring and Kitasato Shibasaburō demonstrate passive immunity, protection of animals from infection by injection of immune serum (1890).
* Thomas Hunt Morgan identifies a sex chromosome linked gene in ''Drosophila melanogaster'' (1910) and his student Alfred Sturtevant develops the first genetic map (1913).
* Alexander Fleming demonstrates that the zone of inhibition around a growth of penicillin mould on a culture dish of bacteria is caused by a diffusible substance secreted by the mould (1928).
* Frederick Griffith demonstrates (Griffith's experiment) that living cells can be transformed via a transforming principle, later discovered to be DNA (1928).
* Karl von Frisch decodes the waggle dance honey bees use to communicate the location of flowers (1940).
* George Wells Beadle and Edward Lawrie Tatum moot the "one gene-one enzyme hypothesis" based on induced mutations in bread mold ''Neurospora crassa'' (1941).
* Luria–Delbrück experiment demonstrates that in bacteria, beneficial mutations arise in the absence of selection, rather than being a response to selection (1943).
* Barbara McClintock breeds maize plants for color, which leads to the discovery of transposable elements or jumping genes (1944).
* Linus Pauling and colleagues show in " Sickle Cell Anemia, a Molecular Disease" that a human genetic disease, sickle cell anemia, is caused by a molecular change in a specific protein, hemoglobin (1949).
* Hershey–Chase experiment (by Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase) uses bacteriophage to prove that DNA is the hereditary material (1952).
* Meselson–Stahl experiment proves that DNA replication is semiconservative (1958).
* Crick, Brenner et al. experiment using frameshift mutations to support the triplet nature of the genetic code (1961).
* Nirenberg and Matthaei experiment demonstrating ''in vitro'' protein synthesis using synthetic RNA as to substitute for messenger RNA (1961).
* John Gurdon clones an animal, a frog tadpole, from an egg cell using the nucleus from an intestinal cell (1962).
* Roger W. Sperry shows the potential independence of the two sides of the human brain using ''split-brain'' patients (1962–1965).
* Nirenberg and Leder experiment, binding tRNA to ribosomes with synthetic RNA to decipher the genetic code (1964).
* Demonstration of the role of reverse transcriptases in tumor viruses, independently by Howard Temin and David Baltimore, 1970.
* Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen selectively clone genes in bacteria, using bacterial plasmids cut by specific endonucleases (1975).
* Mary-Dell Chilton shows that crown gall tumors of plants are caused by the transfer of a small piece of DNA from the bacterium '' Agrobacterium tumefaciens'' into the host plant, where it becomes part of its genome (1977).
* Napoli, Lemieux and Jorgensen discover the principle of RNA interference (1990).

Chemistry

* Blaise Pascal carries a barometer up a church tower and a mountain to determine that atmospheric pressure is due to a column of air (1648).
*Robert Boyle uses an air pump to determine the inverse relationship between the pressure and volume of a gas. This relationship came to be known as Boyle's law (1660–1662).
*Joseph Priestley suspends a bowl of water above a beer vat at a brewery and synthesizes carbonated water (1767).
*Antoine Lavoisier