A design of an undergraduate experiment to measure the speed of light.

Abstract

In 1957, an American Journal of Physics publication entitled "Laboratory Measurement of the Velocity of Light", authors W.Parker Alford and Albert Gold state: "The method is based on the result that the Fourier transform of a pair of identical pulses yields a frequency spectrum with zeros which are simply related to the time separation of the pulses,,[6]. Their method consisted of light traveling along two different paths being detected by a single detector and the zeros of the Fourier transform being determined by directing the output of the detector through a short-wave radio input and tuning through a range of short-wave frequencies. The present work is to try to update this experiment by having the detector create a digital data file, and using fast Fourier transform techniques to locate the zeros. This report is about the use of computer (spreadsheet) modeling to evaluate the feasibility of the experiment and to determine the experimental parameters.