Shake the hand that shook the hand of P.T. Barnum and Charlie Chan. – Garcia / Hunter
Year Awarded: 1907
Year of Discovery: Various
Albert Abraham Michelson
Alright… raise your hands if you haven’t heard of the Michelson – Morley experiment. Right? Everybody’s heard of this one. It’s not what he won the Nobel prize for, but it was a very influential experiment nonetheless. It showed that light travels at a constant speed in all inertial systems of reference, thus disproving the luminiferous aether theory of light, and quite possibly influencing Einsteins theory of special relativity, although there is some historical controversy over that. But kind of a big deal regardless of how you look at it. Somewhat ironically, Michelson considered this result a failure, and apparently went to his grave with the belief that light must somehow be propagated through some ghostly medium.
The actual wording of the Nobel prize justification was: “for his optical precision instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations carried out with their aid”
Michelson had always been fascinated by the study of light. He said that studying light was fun. The remainder of his scientific career was spent in this area, with much of his thought dedicated to accurately measuring the speed of light. This led to the ability to accurately measure terrestrial distances via rangefinders, but also the distance to stars, and to determining their diameters. Another interesting length topic he bent his mind to was the measurement of the meter against the wavelength of cadmium light.
Over the course of his career he received many awards beyond the Nobel, such as the Rumford Prize, the Copley Medal, and the prestigious Prix Jules Janssen. Additionally he was awarded many honorary doctorates at universities around the globe. He is also noted as being the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize.
And who doesn’t remember him being portrayed as a young man on the TV show Bonanza in 1962.
On a personal note, Michelson spent some amount of time at the Mt. Wilson observatory. A climbing partner and astronomer friend of mine also spent time at Wilson. Perhaps he knew someone, who knew someone who knew Michelson. A six degrees of separation kind of thing.
