Experimental Determination of the Velocity of Light
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Nobel Prize-winning physicist describes ground-breaking researches in light and optics, including famed experiment that confirmed the speed of light as a fundamental physical constant.
Albert Abraham Michelson was an American physicist, educator and author, best known for his work on measuring the speed of light and especially for the Michelson–Morley experiment.
Background
Michelson was born on December 19, 1852, in Strzelno, Province of Posen in Prussia (now Poland), the son of Samuel Michelson and his wife, Rosalie Przlubska, both of Jewish descent. He moved to the United States with his parents in 1855, at the age of two. He grew up in the mining towns of Murphy's Camp, California and Virginia City, Nevada, where his father was a merchant.
Education
Michelson finished high school while staying with his aunt Henriette Levy Michelson in San Francisco. He then took the competitive examinations for congressional appointment to the U. S. Naval Academy. Although he qualified for the appointment, the place was awarded to another boy. Young Michelson travelled to Washington, was unsuccessful in getting President Grant to appoint him to the academy, but then persuaded the commandant to accept him.
During his four years as a midshipman at the Academy, Michelson excelled in optics, heat, climatology and drawing. After graduating in 1873 and two years at sea, he returned to the Naval Academy in 1875 to become an instructor in physics and chemistry until 1879.
Then he spent 2 years studying in Berlin, Heidelberg, and Paris.
Career
In 1875 Michelson was appointed instructor in physics and chemistry at Naval Academy in Annapolis. He resigned his commission in 1879. He was then appointed to the Case School of Applied Science at Cleveland, Ohio, as professor of physics. In 1889 he moved to Clark University as professor of physics, and in 1892 he was invited to head the department of physics at the new University of Chicago, a position which he held until 1931.
With few exceptions, all of Michelson's work bore directly on problems involved in the study of light; he was thus specialized to a degree that was unique among Americans at the end of the 19th century. While serving at Annapolis, he hit upon a slight but vital modification to a method then being used to measure the speed of light. With his simple device, consisting essentially of two plane mirrors, one fixed and one revolving at the rate of about 130 turns per second from which light was to be reflected, Michelson succeeded in obtaining a measure closer than any that had been obtained to the presently accepted figure—186, 508 miles per second.
Michelson performed his most famous experiment at Cleveland in collaboration with the chemist Edward W. Morley. Light waves were regarded as undulations of the ether which filled all space. If a light source was moving through the ether, the speed of the light would be different for each direction in which it was emitted. In the Michelson-Morley experiment two beams of light, sent out and reflected back at right angles to each other, took the same amount of time. Thus the notion of a stationary ether had to be discarded.
Even though his own work helped touch off a revolution in physics, Michelson never realized the fundamental nature of the change. Basically a brilliant experimenter, he saw the future development of physics only as one of further precision and newer instruments which would bring the accuracy of scientific measurements to the ultimate degree. He never understood the more mathematical and theoretical approach which came to dominate physics toward the end of his life.
Michelson died on May 9, 1931, while at work on a still more refined measurement of the velocity of light.
His family was Jewish by birth but non-religious, and Michelson himself was a lifelong agnostic.
Views
Quotations:
"The nature of the atoms, and the forces called into play in their chemical union; the interactions between these atoms and the non-differentiated ether as manifested in the phenomena of light and electricity; the structures of the molecules and molecular systems of which the atoms are the units; the explanation of cohesion, elasticity, and gravitation—all these will be marshaled into a single compact and consistent body of scientific knowledge."
"The velocity of light is one of the most important of the fundamental constants of Nature. Its measurement by Foucault and Fizeau gave as the result a speed greater in air than in water, thus deciding in favor of the undulatory and against the corpuscular theory. Again, the comparison of the electrostatic and the electromagnetic units gives as an experimental result a value remarkably close to the velocity of light–a result which justified Maxwell in concluding that light is the propagation of an electromagnetic disturbance. Finally, the principle of relativity gives the velocity of light a still greater importance, since one of its fundamental postulates is the constancy of this velocity under all possible conditions."
"While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established, and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous applications of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. It is here that the science of measurement shows its importance—where the quantitative results are more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent physicist has remarked that the future truths of Physical Science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."
"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote."
Membership
Michelson was a member of the Royal Society, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Interests
Billiards, sailing, tennis, playing violin, drawing
Connections
In 1877, Michelson married Margaret Hemingway, daughter of a wealthy New York stockbroker and lawyer. They had two sons and a daughter. In 1899, he married Edna Stanton. They raised one son and three daughters.