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Michelson, Albert Abraham -- physicist

The 1907 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Albert Abraham Michelson. He is the first American to be so honored in one of the sciences, who also happens to be of Polish-Jewish descent. He was known as the "Master of Light." The Nobel Prize was for his optical precision instruments and for the spectroscopic and metrological investigations he made with them. The passion of his life was the accurate measurement of the velocity of light. Other major achievements of this physicist are: the invention of the interferometer for measuring distances by means of the length of light waves; the measurement of a meter in terms of the wavelength of cadmium light for the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, and the employment of light interference to make determinations of the size of stars.

From: Wally West

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