Today we did a classic Modern physics lab. Bohr spectroscopy! It was really nice.

We used an Ocean Optics Spectrometer to look at the spectral lines of various atoms. The data was great. I heard one of the students say his percent error was 3% on the Rydberg constant. Not bad for a teaching lab.

Professor Rao had the classic old school visual spectroscopy set ups from his “How Things Work Class”, so we got to play with them for a while. Its cool to be able to go back and forth between the classic experiments and the newer ways.