Physics307L F08:People/Martin/Speed of Light

F08:People/Martin/Notebook/071010
 * 1) Brief summary of what I did.  Link the the lab manual:
 * 2) Links to all wiki pages that contain my notebook entries.

Purpose To measure the speed of light

Results




 * slope: 3.06E8 m/s +/- 1.83E7 m/s
 * wikipedia definition of the speed of light: 299792458 m/s
 * percent error: 2%

How to improve on the results
 * our percent error was only two percent, that is pretty good
 * I think that most of our error was random
 * We had discussed eliminating some of the major random error by ignoring the random output by the oscilloscope (the reading jumped around and was hard to determine a definite value) and connecting the system up to some computer system, I would be interested to see if Tomas can do this and if it will work better.

Conclusion
 * During this lab I learned how a lot of equipment worked and got to test one of the most fundamental constants in physics. Overall I think that the results of this lab both in myself and the numbers that we got were quite impressive.