Albert Abraham Michelson - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.

org/wiki/Albert_Abraham_Michelson

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Albert Abraham Michelson (December 19, 1852 – Albert Abraham Michelson

May 9, 1931) was an American physicist known for
his work on the measurement of the speed of light and
especially for the Michelson-Morley experiment. In
1907 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics. He
became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize
in sciences.

1 Biography
2 Speed of light
2.1 Early measurements
2.2 Mount Wilson and Lookout
Mountain
2.3 Michelson, Pease & Pearson
2.4 Interferometry
3 Astronomical interferometry Born December 19, 1852
4 Michelson in popular culture Strzelno, Kingdom of Prussia
5 Honours and awards Died May 9, 1931 (aged 78)
6 Notes Pasadena, California
7 References
Nationality United States
8 External links
Fields Physics
Institutions Case Western Reserve University
Clark University
University of Chicago
Michelson was born in Strzelno, Provinz Posen in the Alma mater United States Naval Academy
Kingdom of Prussia (now Poland) into a Jewish family University of Berlin
[1] Doctoral advisor
. He moved to the United States with his parents in Hermann Helmholtz
1855, when he was two years old. He grew up in the Doctoral students Robert Millikan
rough mining towns of Murphy's Camp, California and
Known for Speed of light
Virginia City, Nevada, where his father was a
Michelson-Morley experiment
merchant. He spent his high school years in San
Francisco in the home of his aunt, Henriette Levy (née Notable awards Nobel Prize for Physics (1907)
Michelson), who was the mother of author Harriet Signature
Lane Levy.[2]

President Ulysses S. Grant awarded Michelson a

special appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy in 1869. During his four years as a midshipman at the
Academy, Michelson excelled in optics, heat and climatology as well as drawing. After his graduation in 1873

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and two years at sea, he returned to the Academy in 1875 to become an instructor in physics and chemistry until
1879. In 1879, he was posted to the Nautical Almanac Office, Washington, to work with Simon Newcomb, but
in the following year, he obtained leave of absence to continue his studies in Europe. He visited the Universities
of Berlin and Heidelberg, and the Collège de France and École Polytechnique in Paris.

Michelson was fascinated with the sciences and the problem of measuring the speed of light in particular. While
at Annapolis, he conducted his first experiments of the speed of light, as part of a class demonstration in 1877.
After two years of studies in Europe, he resigned from the Navy in 1881. In 1883 he accepted a position as
professor of physics at the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio and concentrated on developing
an improved interferometer. In 1887 he and Edward Morley carried out the famous Michelson-Morley
experiment which seemed to rule out the existence of the aether. He later moved on to use astronomical
interferometers in the measurement of stellar diameters and in measuring the separations of binary stars.

In 1889 Michelson became a professor at Clark University at Worcester, Massachusetts and in 1892 was
appointed professor and the first head of the department of physics at the newly organized University of
Chicago.

In 1899, he married Edna Stanton and they raised one son and three daughters.

In 1907, Michelson had the honor of being the first American to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics "for his optical
precision instruments and the spectroscopic and meteorological investigations carried out with their aid". He
also won the Copley Medal in 1907, the Henry Draper Medal in 1916 and the Gold Medal of the Royal
Astronomical Society in 1923. A crater on the Moon is named after him.

Michelson died in Pasadena, California at the age of 78. The University of Chicago Residence Halls
remembered Michelson and his achievements by dedicating Michelson House (http://michelson-
house.uchicago.edu) in his honor. Case Western Reserve has also dedicated a Michelson House to him, and an
academic building at the United States Naval Academy also bears his name. Michelson Laboratory at Naval Air
Weapons Station China Lake in Ridgecrest, California is named after him. There is an interesting display in the
publicly accessible area of the Lab which includes facsimiles of Michelson's Nobel Prize medal, the prize
document, and examples of his diffraction gratings.

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Early measurements

As early as 1877, while still serving as an officer in the United States

Navy, Michelson started planning a refinement of the rotating-mirror
method of Léon Foucault for measuring the speed of light, using improved
optics and a longer baseline. He conducted some preliminary
measurements using largely improvised equipment in 1878 about which
time his work came to the attention of Simon Newcomb, director of the
Nautical Almanac Office who was already advanced in planning his own
study. Michelson published his result of 299,910±50 km/s in 1879 before
joining Newcomb in Washington DC to assist with his measurements
there. Thus began a long professional collaboration and friendship
between the two.

Simon Newcomb, with his more adequately funded project, obtained a

value of 299,860±30 km/s, just at the extreme edge of consistency with
Michelson's. Michelson continued to "refine" his method and in 1883
published a measurement of 299,853±60 km/s, rather closer to that of his Page one of Michelson's
Experimental Determination of the
mentor. Velocity of Light

Mount Wilson and Lookout Mountain

In 1906, a novel electrical method was used by E. B. Rosa and N. E.

Dorsey of the National Bureau of Standards to obtain a value for the
speed of light of 299,781±10 km/s. Though this result has subsequently
been shown to be severely biased by the poor electrical standards in use at
the time, it seems to have set a fashion for rather lower measured values. Concluding page of Michelson's
Experimental Determination of the
From 1920, Michelson started planning a definitive measurement from the Velocity of Light
Mount Wilson Observatory, using a baseline to Lookout Mountain, a
prominent bump on the south ridge of Mount San Antonio (Old Baldy), some 22 miles distant.

In 1922, the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey began two years of painstaking measurement of the baseline using
the recently available invar tapes. With the baseline length established in 1924, measurements were carried out
over the next two years to obtain the published value of 299,796±4 km/s.[3]

Famous as the measurement is, it was beset by problems, not least of which was the haze created by the smoke
from forest fires which blurred the mirror image. It is also probable that the intensively detailed work of the
Geodetic Survey, with an estimated error of less than one part in 1 million, was compromised by a shift in the
baseline arising from the Santa Barbara earthquake of 29 June 1925 which was an estimated magnitude of 6.3
on the Richter scale.

Michelson, Pease & Pearson

The period after 1927 marked the advent of new measurements of the speed of light using novel electro-optic
devices, all substantially lower than Michelson's 1926 value.

Michelson sought another measurement but this time in an evacuated tube to avoid difficulties in interpreting
the image owing to atmospheric effects. In 1930, he began a collaboration with Francis G. Pease and Fred
Pearson to perform a measurement in a 1.6 km tube at Pasadena, California. Michelson died with only 36 of the

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233 measurement series completed and the experiment was subsequently beset by geological instability and
condensation problems before the result of 299,774±11 km/s, consistent with the prevailing electro-optic values,
was published posthumously in 1935.

Interferometry

In 1887 he collaborated with colleague Edward Williams Morley of Western Reserve College, now part of Case
Western Reserve University, in the Michelson-Morley experiment. Their experiment for the expected motion of
the Earth relative to the aether, the hypothetical medium in which light was supposed to travel, resulted in a null
result. Surprised, Michelson repeated the experiment with greater and greater precision over the next years, but
continued to find no ability to measure the aether. The Michelson-Morley results were immensely influential in
the physics community, leading Hendrik Lorentz to devise his now-famous Lorentz contraction equations as a
means of explaining the null result.

There has been some historical controversy over whether Albert Einstein was aware of the Michelson-Morley
results when he developed his theory of special relativity, which pronounced the aether to be "superfluous".
Regardless of Einstein's specific knowledge, the experiment is today considered the canonical experiment in
regards to showing the lack of a detectable aether.[4][5]

From 1920 and into 1921 Michelson and Francis G. Pease became the first individuals to measure the diameter
of a star other than the Sun. They used an astronomical interferometer at the Mount Wilson Observatory to
measure the diameter of the super-giant star Betelgeuse. A periscope arrangement was used to obtain a densified
pupil in the interferometer, a method later investigated in detail by Antoine Émile Henry Labeyrie for use in
"Hypertelescopes". The measurement of stellar diameters and the separations of binary stars took up an
increasing amount of Michelson's life after this.

In an episode of the television series Bonanza (Look to the Stars, broadcast March 18, 1962), Ben Cartwright
(Lorne Greene) helps the 16-year-old Albert Abraham Michelson (portrayed by 25-year-old Douglas Lambert
(1936-1986)) obtain an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, despite the opposition of the bigoted town
schoolteacher (played by William Schallert). Bonanza was set in and around Virginia City, Nevada, where
Michelson lived with his parents prior to leaving for the Naval Academy. In a voice-over at the end of the
episode, Greene mentions Michelson's 1907 Nobel Prize.

The home in which Michelson lived as a child in Murphys Camp, California is now a tasting room for Twisted
Oak Winery.

Michelson House in Shoreland Hall, an undergraduate dorm at The University of Chicago, is named after him.

Michelson House, an undergraduate residence hall at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, is
named after him.

Michelson Hall (housing the departments of Computer Science and Chemistry) at the US Naval Academy is
named after him.

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Royal Society
National Academy of Sciences
American Physical Society
American Association for the Advancement of Science
Nobel Prize for Physics (1907)
Rumford Prize (1888)
Matteucci Medal (1903)
Copley Medal (1907)
Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1923)
The Computer Measurement Group gives an annual A. A.
Michelson award A monument at United States Naval
Michelson Laboratory aboard Naval Air Weapons Station, China Academy marks the path of Michelson's
Lake, California experiments measuring the speed of
light.

1. ^ http://www.aip.org/history/gap/Michelson/Michelson.html
2. ^ Levy, 920 O'Farrell Street, 47.
3. ^ Garner, C. L., Captain (retired) (April 1949). "A Geodetic Measurement of Unusually High Accuracy"
(http://www.pvaa.us/nightwatch/GeodeticMeasurementOfUnusuallyHighAccuracy.pdf) . Coast and Geodetic
Survey. pp. 68–74. http://www.pvaa.us/nightwatch/GeodeticMeasurementOfUnusuallyHighAccuracy.pdf. Retrieved
2009-08-13.
4. ^ Note that while Einstein's 1905 paper On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies appears to reference the
experiment on first glance—"together with the unsuccessful attempts to discover any motion of the earth relatively
to the 'light medium,' suggest that the phenomena of electrodynamics as well as of mechanics possess no properties
corresponding to the idea of absolute rest"—it has been shown that Einstein was referring to a different category of
experiments here.
5. ^ Holton, Gerald, "Einstein, Michelson, and the 'Crucial' Experiment", Isis, Vol. 60, No. 2 (Summer, 1969), pp.
133-197

Livingston, D. M. (1973). The Master of Light: A Biography of Albert A. Michelson. ISBN 0226487113.
Levy, Harriet Lane (1996). 920 O'Farrell Street. Berkeley: Heyday Books. ISBN 0930588916.

Albert Abraham Michelson National Academy of Science (http://books.nap.edu/books/0309025184

/html/282.html)
Michelson's Life and Works from the American Institute of Physics (http://www.aip.org/history
/gap/Michelson/Michelson.html)
U. S. Naval Academy and The Navy (http://www.usna.edu/LibExhibits/Michelson/Michelson_navy.html)
Michelson House at the University of Chicago (http://michelson-house.uchicago.edu)
Michelson's Nobel Prize Biography (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1907/michelson-
bio.html)
Works by Albert Abraham Michelson (http://www.gutenberg.org/author/Albert_A._Michelson) at Project
Gutenberg

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Albert Abraham Michelson - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Abraham_Michelson

Experimental Determination of the Velocity of Light (http://www.gutenberg.net/browse/BIBREC

/BR11753.HTM)
IMDB: Bonanza episode Look to the Stars (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0529603/)
NAWS China Lake [1] (http://www.navair.navy.mil/nawcwd/nawcwd/news/2008
/2008-02_michelson.htm)
The Master of Light - documentary profiling Michelson's life and career (http://store.videoproject.com
/mas-983-d.html)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Abraham_Michelson"
Categories: American physicists | Case Western Reserve University faculty | Experimental physicists | History of
Los Angeles, California | Nobel laureates in Physics | Recipients of the Copley Medal | United States Naval
Academy graduates | United States Navy officers | University of Chicago faculty | Recipients of the Gold Medal
of the Royal Astronomical Society | Paternal Jews | Polish-German Jews | German-American Jews | Jewish
scientists | Jewish inventors | 1852 births | 1931 deaths

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