Last week Brendan and Owen left having finished their portion of the program. This is the beginning of the second half of the program. Now I have to work on completing all of the things that I had discussed under my future plans during my presentation.

An interesting note about my presentation was that somebody had asked the question about why I did not investigate using an interference method. I had done some research earlier about interference methods. Interference methods are quite accurate. They measure a mechanical displacement. Small interference methods however usually have a small range. Within this small range they can make very accurate calculations. It will create very fine fringes. However this method becomes incapable if measurements have to exceed more than a few wavelengths.

Some data was taken with my tank in the previous week. I took photos of the tank with the digital camera and then plotted out the paths of the ray as it is continually refracting in the media.

• My future plans are to come up with a way of developing a formula for the graphs of the trajectories.
• Other things that I may start to do now could be building another tank and working with that. Or the medium could be placed in something else that would give it a larger range of measuring. I had read in some books about using test tubes to measure vertical changes in index of refraction.

Catenary Curve: The Trajectory of Continuous Refraction

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In the previous link I made a page about some of the formulas that I gathered dealing with Catenary curves.