michelson: Results from Michelson's determination of the velocity of...

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Results from Michelson's determination of the velocity of light in air.

Description

These data are actually measurements obtained by Michelson between June 5, 1879, and July 2, 1879. The data are in km/sec if 299000 is added to each value. Working backwards from the current ‘true value’ of the velocity of light in vacuum (299,792.5 km/sec) and using Michelson's own adjustment for the effect of air, the comparable ‘true value’ for these data is 734.5 (considerably smaller than the actual measurements). Michelson used a modification of Foucault's 1850 experimental method which consisted of passing light from a source off a rapidly rotating mirror to a distant fixed mirror, and back to the rotating mirror. Presumably the five sets of 20 measurements are in time sequence. From Stigler (1977 Annals of Statistics, p.1073-1076, Table 6).

Format

A data frame with 100 observations on the following 2 variables.

velocity

: measured velocity of light as described above

set

: the set in which the measurement was taken

Examples

lplot(michelson$velocity,michelson$set)
bplot(michelson$velocity,michelson$set)

Rlab documentation built on May 5, 2022, 1:05 a.m.