You can measure pi all kinds of crazy ways, including dropping pins at random orientations on a piece of lined paper. I forget the details but given the length of the pins and the distance between the parallel lines, pi can be calculated from the proportion of pins that cross the lines. So I guess it’s possible somebody might conceive of a way to measure pi using mirrors on mountains, but nothing like that is likely to result in a value of pi that will become widely accepted as specified in the clue.
One of the questions in the 2 “B” or Not 2 “B” category was “What is shibboleth?”, which no one got. I did not get it at home either. I’m sorry.
Was anyone else disappointed that “Alex Trebek” didn’t show up as a clue in the “SNL” category?
Sort of. It’s sort of a misconception that light travels faster in a vacuum than anywhere else. From the perspective of any given photon, it’s always moving at the same speed regardless of medium. But the medium can alter its path so that it bounces around more. So the light is always travelling at c, but through a non-vacuum medium it would take longer to get between two arbitrary points because the medium made it travel more in other directions than just straight ahead.
On the other hand, you may be right - you’d be measuring the speed of light within our atmosphere, in which case you could make a case for c being wrong.
The way the question was phrased could be important. It said the experiment led to an accepted value. Could you measure the speed of light in air, and use that to help determine the speed in a vacuum?
Me too. I was literally shouting it at the TV. Then when the answer came back, Mrs. Homie barely surpressed her snickers. :mad:
From what I’ve read (in Bob Harris’s Prisoner of Trebekistan), the producers tell the contestants what kind of question it’s going to be (i.e., “You can write down ‘what is’ now”) during the commercial break.
That helps to explain why the “What is” (or whatever) part of the [del]answer[/del] response almost always looks neater and tidier than the rest of the [del]answer[/del] response. Thanks. That has been gnawing at my subconscious for some time.
Sure. You can measure the index of refraction of air using aninterferometer, then c = v*n. I remember doing it in high school - it’s a pretty neat experiment. Here’s a description (pdf) of the experiment.