On this Picostat.com statistics page, you will find information about the newcomb data set which pertains to Newcomb's Measurements of the Passage Time of Light. The newcomb data set is found in the MASS R package. You can load the newcomb data set in R by issuing the following command at the console data("newcomb"). This will load the data into a variable called newcomb. If R says the newcomb data set is not found, you can try installing the package by issuing this command install.packages("MASS") and then attempt to reload the data. If you need to download R, you can go to the R project website. You can download a CSV (comma separated values) version of the newcomb R data set. The size of this file is about 203 bytes.

Newcomb's Measurements of the Passage Time of Light

Description

A numeric vector giving the ‘Third Series’ of measurements of the passage time of light recorded by Newcomb in 1882. The given values divided by 1000 plus 24 give the time in millionths of a second for light to traverse a known distance. The ‘true’ value is now considered to be 33.02.

Usage

newcomb

Source

S. M. Stigler (1973) Simon Newcomb, Percy Daniell, and the history of robust estimation 1885–1920. Journal of the American Statistical Association 68, 872–879.

R. G. Staudte and S. J. Sheather (1990) Robust Estimation and Testing. Wiley.

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Dataset imported from https://www.r-project.org.