PREFACE. This manual is the latest of a series of manuals prepared by members of the staff of the Physics Laboratory at the University of Missouri. The development has taken so many years and so many different instructors have contributed ideas and made alterations that it would be impossible to give credit to all of them by name. It has seemed wise now not merely to revise the manual but to rewrite it to a large extent, amplifying the instructions where experience showed them to be too brief, increasing the content of many of the shorter experiments, and omitting some which had become obsolete. A number of new exercises, which have been tried out in the laboratory, have been added, new diagrams drawn, and the arrangement changed to agree in general with the order of presentation of the subjectmatter in Physics, A Text-Book for Colleges by Stewart. References have been given to that text and also to College Physics by Kimball, College Physics by Duff, and A Text-Book of Physics, Third Edition, by Spinney. It has been found that a large percentage of the students electing the courses for which this manual was prepared have had no previous work in physics and practically no laboratory training. The material presented is therefore of a somewhat more elementary nature than in books designed for students of greater experience in science and mathematics. Discussions of theory of laboratory practice and of errors and accuracy in data have not been attempted. An effort has been made to confine the apparatus described to types which can be found in any reasonably well-equipped laboratory and many alternative methods have been described. In general the writer has endeavored to present a list of experiments which illustrate the important principles brought out in a text-book of general physics rather than a group of laboratory exercises having no very obvious relation to the class-room work and possessing value mainly for training in laboratory technique. Enough exercises have been given to permit an instructor to select a group to fit the apparatus at his disposal. The system (5) 610250 of numbering will permit a teacher to insert extra experiments of his own and to number them to correspond with the proper groups. Acknowledgment is due to Dr. H. C. Rentschler and Dr. C. W. Heaps, former members of the staff, who compiled one of the earlier editions, to Professors O. M. Stewart and H. M. Reese for advice and encouragement, and especially to Mr. R. T. Dufford for many valuable suggestions and for critical reading of the manuscript. |