Snells Law Experiment Essay Samples

Snells Law Experiment

...tered the prism at, as well as the angle the light exited the prism at. Data Processing & Presentation To get the angle used, we took the drawings of the path of the light on the piece of paper, and then drew a normal line in respect to the lights path. Using this method, we got these angles: Trial Angle of Refraction Angle of Incidence 1 1.3o 2.0o 2 10.0o 15.0o 3 16.0o 23.6o 4 31.0o 49.5 5 41.5o 72.5o Using these angles, we can calculate the index of refraction for the prism, since we have both of the angles and the index of refraction of air. Trial #1 n1sin1=n2sin2 (1.00)(sin2.0o) = n2(sin1.3o) n2 = 1.538 + 6.4% Trial #2 n1sin1=n2sin2 (1.00)(sin15o) = n2(sin10o) n2 = 1.490 + 0.8% Trial #3 n1sin1=n2sin2 (1.00)(sin23.6o) = n2(sin16.0o) n2 = 1.452 + 0.5% Trial #4 n1sin1=n2sin2 (1.00)(sin49.5o) = n2(sin31o) n2 = 1.476 + 0.3% Trial #5 n1sin1=n2sin2 (1.00)(sin72.5o) = n2(sin41.5o) n2 = 1.479 + 0.2% The literature value for a prism tends to be nprism = 1.5. Using this, we can find our percent difference: % difference = [(exp. value) - (lit. value)] / (lit. value) x 100 = (1.479 - 1.5) / 1.5 x 100 = -1.4% Conclusion & Evaluation As you can see, our percent difference was -1.4%, which is very small. For some of the data, the uncertainty error falls into the range of the correct index value, but not all of them. Random error probably counts towards some of the error since the lines may have been drawn a bit off. It is likely that it does though because of such a small margin of error. One source of error was when l...

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