Michelson and his interferometer

APR 01, 1974

Pioneering applications in such diverse fields as astronomy, atomic spectra and mensuration followed the initial disappointment over the failure to detect a luminiferous ether.

DOI: 10.1063/1.3128534

Robert S. Shankland

Albert Abraham Michelson was the first American scientist to win the Nobel Prize, and his career is one of the most fascinating in the entire history of physics. His earliest work was firmly based on the classical physics of geometrical optics—in a precise determination of the velocity of light by an improved Foucault method. But then he mastered wave optics and invented his interferometer, and from that point on he proceeded to dazzle the scientific world with a display of the applications he found for his invention during a career that exhibited throughout a unique pattern of originality and dedication to physics.

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References

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More about the authors

Robert S. Shankland, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.