Physics307L:People/Martin/Speed of Light
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- Brief summary of what I did. Link the the lab manual: [1]
- 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 SJK 01:13, 25 October 2007 (CDT)
- 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 randomSJK 01:16, 25 October 2007 (CDT)
- 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.