American Decades
The Velocity of Light
Monograph
By: Albert A. Michelson
Date: 1902
Source: Michelson, Albert A. The Velocity of Light. Vol. 9 of The Decennial Publications. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1902, 7–9.
About the Author: Albert Abraham Michelson (1852–1931) was born in what is today Germany. He immigrated with his family to Panama, then to San Francisco. In 1873 he graduated from the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, where he stayed to teach physics. In 1881 he resigned from the navy to accept a professorship at the Case Institute of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1907 he became the first American to win a Nobel Prize in physics.
Introduction
In the seventeenth century Isaac Newton passed white light through a prism, refracting it into a spectrum of colors. Light, he reasoned, must consist of particles of different sizes, with each size corresponding...
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1900's Science and Technology Primary Sources
- The Velocity of Light
- Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics
- Diary Entry of December 17, 1903
- Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency
- Adolescence: Its Psychology
- Adams Act
- Pragmatism
- Plant-Breeding: Being Six Lectures upon the Amelioration of Domestic Plants
- Comparative Physiology of the Brain and Comparative Psychology
- Genetics and the Debate Over Acquired Traits
- General Lectures on Electrical Engineering
- "Mutation"
- "The Cell in Relation to Heredity and Evolution"
- The Evolution of Worlds
- Copyright Page
- Acknowledgments
