Watt Webb, professor of applied physics and the S.B. Eckert Professor in Engineering at Cornell, has been named the 1999 recipient of the Michelson-Morley award. The award is given by Case Western Reserve University to recognize outstanding achievements in the sciences. It carries a prize of $10,000.
Webb has been invited to Case Western's Cleveland campus May 4 to deliver the Michelson-Morley Lecture to an audience of faculty, students and visitors. The lecture will be followed by a dinner in Webb's honor.
The Michelson-Morley award has been given since 1993 in honor of physicists Albert Michelson and Edward Morley. Michelson designed the modern interferometer, with which he measured the speed of light to a previously unequaled degree of accuracy. With Morley he conducted the seminal Michelson-Morley experiment, whose results ultimately were explained by Einstein's theory of relativity.
Webb has studied mechanisms of mechano-electrical transduction, the process by which animals hear sound. Webb and his colleagues began by studying the vibrations of the eardrums of field crickets. Then they moved on to frogs, ultimately leading to the identification of the sensitivity limit of mammalian hearing as the random mechanical noise.
Webb and his colleagues have just finished building a computerized and portable interferometer to measure the ultrafast laser pulse widths that they use to excite fluorescent molecules in studying biophysical processes with multiphoton microscopy, one of their instrumentation developments.
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