Physics307L F09:People/Callow/SpeedofLight

Links to lab notebook and manual
Link to my lab notebook

Link to lab manual used

Purpose of the lab
In this lab we experimentally found the speed of light.

Summary of Data
We found the speed of light to be 29.6(6) cm/ns which compared to the accepted value of 30.0 cm/ns is only about 1.3% off and less than a single sdem away from our value. I'm pretty happy with this result, especially considering that we were measuring differences in time of less than single nanoseconds and still managed to be so accurate.

What I learned
I didn't have a computer with me in this lab to take notes on and it feels like a lot of the details of what happened in lab may have not been noted as well. My lab notes are usually not much to begin with other than just keeping track of data which we managed to do with Johnny Gonzalez's laptop, but I do generally write little notes when a problem comes up that help me remember everything later when I go back to do the full writeup. I'm not sure how much using a standard notebook to write in would have helped as for me just like any other notes I try and take in classes it has about a 95% chance of getting lost in the sea of notes and papers on my apartment floor. In the future if desktops aren't available I'll probably want to have my netbook with me or learn to organize notes on paper(which is unlikely to ever happen).

We also had a very hard time figuring out how to set things up. This had a lot to do with not reading the manuals for the equipment.