A.A. MichelsonDied 9 May 1931 at age 78 (born 19 Dec 1852). Albert Abraham Michelson was a German-American physicist physicist who accurately measured the speed of light and received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Physics “for his optical precision instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations” he carried out with them. He designed the highly accurate Michelson interferometer and used it to establish the speed of light as a fundamental constant. With Edward Morley, he also used it in an attempt to measure the velocity of the earth through the ether (1887). The experiment yielded null results that eventually led Einstein to his theory of relativity. He measured the standard meter bar in Paris to be 1,553,163.5 wavelengths of the red cadmium line (1892-3).« |
