Keeping up the string of poll questions about less-well-known physicists (started here), here's a list of physicists who are known for having made very precise measurements of physical quanitites. Which of them is the best?
(Note: I have deliberately limited this to physicists who are no longer alive, which is why some recent names are missing.)
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Ah, there's Michelson.
I owe this one to Millikan. Undergrads still do the oil drop experiment here at uchicago, but somehow I managed to escape without having to screw up my eyesight. Also, his old house here was inhabited by a bunch of college students who threw some great parties in his old basement.
John Henry Poynting.
Gotta be Cavendish, just because he was so weird.
I said Cavendish, just because gravity is so damn weak. But I could be persuaded on Michelson. It took a lot of thought to realize that he could measure the effect he was looking for via the very indirect method that he used. Cavendish's measurement was, comparatively, more direct.
my first instinct was to vote Millikan, but i finally gravitated to Cavendish.
Wot no Eotvos?
I enjoyed doing the Cavendish experiment in my undergrad so voted for him. Millikan can burn in hell.
I voted for Michelson, but Cavendish is also a great choice.
Wait, is this about precision, or about accuracy?
And can't someone be "the best" based on citations and how much research was kicked off by the work, rather than on their own level of original perfection?
I think good research is kind of like fitness in evolution -- measured by the number of successful grandchildren (grin).
I have to say Lamb. Doppler broadening is so very annoying, and you can only cool your atoms so far, and even that might not be enough to see the lamb shift. If you look through very old papers trying to measure even something simple as the isotope shift, it was still difficult for them to see it even when using very cold hydrogen.
So to figure out a technique which delicately sidesteps doppler broadening problems is something i consider very ingenious. To use microwaves (which have smaller doppler broadening) to excite hydrogen from the 2s1 state to a 2p1/2 or 2p3/2 state, and then measure the current produced from the hydrogen striking a target (which is proportional to the amount of hydrogen in an excited state) is very cool. Not as cool as doppler free spectroscopy though.
because interferometry is also such a neat trick, i would list michelson at the top of my list too.
cavendish and millikan seem more like a brute force method.
I had to go with "fiendishly difficult to do", and went with Cavendish over Michelson because gravity is so weak that this experiment is difficult even today. However, I suppose lasers have spoiled us into thinking interferometry is not nearly as difficult as it was in the days of Young and the others in your optics list, as well as Michelson.
Willis Lamb, because the head of my research group was his graduate student!
In seriousness I think he'd be my pick anyway, but Cavendish is a close second.
I might have voted Cavendish except that he didn't publish most of his stuff!
Albert Michelson made some non-null measurements, swept under the rug ever since, except confirmed with higher precision by Silvertooth with laser interferometry (i'd spoken to the late Silvertooth several times at Caltech alumni reunions). And speaking of Caltech, I've got to give Millikan credit for being the first to measure a charge of 1/3 e.
I've seen Millikan's lab book for the oil drop experiment in the Caltech library. I was less then impressed with the way he wrote our a long sting of numbers then went back with pen to write in the significant figures. That being said the man was an amazing experimentalist. My vote for worst grad student job would have to go to the poor guy who had to look into the Michelson interferometer mounted on a rotating apparatus (floating on mercury)in a dark room (no lasers so the light came from a heliostat).