Abstract
WE much regret to announce the death, which occurred on May 9, of Prof. A. A. Michelson, the distinguished physicist of the University of Chicago. Prof. Michelson was probably best known for his wonderful experimental work to detect any effect of the earth's rotation on the velocity of light. At the end of 1929, he resigned his position at the University of Chicago and went to Pasadena, where he proposed to carry out further work on this subject, and it is reported that preliminary measurements have already been made. Prof. Michelson had worked previously at Mount Wilson Observatory, Pasadena, and a brief account of repetitions of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment, as it is generally called, with a diagram of the apparatus, was contributed to NATURE of Jan. 19, 1929, by him and his collaborators. The results then obtained showed no displacement of the interferometer fringes so great as one-fifteenth of that to be expected on the supposition of an effect due to a motion of the solar system of three hundred kilometres per second through the ether. Since then, Prof. Michelson has been awarded the Duddell Medal for 1929 of the Physical Society of London for his work on interferometry.
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Prof. A. A. Michelson, For.Mem.R.S. Nature 127, 751–753 (1931). https://doi.org/10.1038/127751a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/127751a0