Great experiments not only reveal profound features of our world, they also impress us with the beauty of their design. By reproducing seminal experiments in the history of physics, one can gain a better understanding of the course of our discipline and clarify the specific features that contributed to the original achievements. Replication may be suitable as a classroom exercise, as in the case of Hans Christian Oersted’s and Michael Faraday’s experiments showing the connection between electricity and magnetism. Or it could be difficult and expensive; no student laboratory will restage the recent discovery of the Higgs-like boson in the foreseeable future!
Experimentally rerunning Mikhail Lomonosov’s 1761 discovery of the Venusian atmosphere may not be of Higgs-boson difficulty, but it poses unique challenges. Not the least of those is that the observation relies on the planet’s transit across the Sun’s disk, an extremely rare event seen by astronomers only in...
