SCB110 - Speed of Light - Measuring the speed of light in glass

The reason for this exercise is to provide you with a kind of virtual experience of performing a scientific experiment. As you are probably aware this unit has over 250 students. This is a very large number of students to get to do a single physics experiment. You would have to be split into about five groups of 50 and be allocated to one of five 2-hour lab sessions. Also, we don't have enough equipment for several groups of students to do the same experiment at the same time. You could all do a different experiment but we don't have 10 different experiments that all relate to the speed of light. The other alternative is not to have any experimental physics component in this unit, which would be a shame.

In this exercise you will watch me (Stephen Hughes) perform an experiment on video to measure the speed of light in two blocks of glass using a laser pointer, piece of paper, a rule and some coloured pencils. The data obtained from the experiment are shown in a table in this document. You will use these data to calculate the refractive index and hence speed of light in two blocks of glass. The purpose of the experiment is to test the hypothesis that the refractive indices of the two blocks of glass are the same within the limits of experimental error.

Category:

Science & Technology

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• QUT
• Blackboard
• Science
• Concepts
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• Global
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• SC