Satmi

Hello everyone,

I'm having a bit of a crisis here with my Physics EE. Despite being given more than enough time to do my extended essay, I now find myself in big trouble only one week before the final deadline. The reason for this, aside from me being a terrible procrastinator, is that I discovered only today that the results from my experiment are completely useless. Not only that, but I'm also lacking a proper research question.
Now writing 4000 words in just a few days won't be a problem on its own, but unless I can quickly figure out a research question and redo my experiment I simply won't have anything to write about. So I'm really hoping I could get some help from here.

My original topic had to do with finding out the thickness of thin (oil) films by measuring interference in them. That turned out to be a pretty impossible topic before I could even get to any experimenting, so instead I ended up measuring the spectrum at different points in Newton's rings produced by white light (well not white light, but continuous spectrum anyway). The phenomenon of Newton's rings is of course pretty simple, but it seems that pretty much all experiments on Newton's rings are being done with monochromatic light and not white light, so I still think this can potentially be a source for an adequate topic.

Anyway, in August I went to the university (I needed a Newton's rings apparatus for my experiment) to make some measurements, and although I didn't have a specific research question I got some pretty good-looking results and I thought I could easily figure out what to concentrate on with my essay. So for a long time I thought I had results where could see the minimums and maximums of different wavelengths spaced out nice and evenly (as could be expected in thin-film interference) – actually the person helping me at the uni thought so too when he saw my measurements. Once I finally started working on the actual essay a week or two ago, I started wondering why the wavelengths at which these maximums occurred weren't really changing much for different points in the pattern. I still wasn't really worried as I thought there would be a reasonable explanation for this – and turns out there was. It's just that it wasn't the kind of explanation I was expecting...
Basically my supervisor, when I finally showed him my results today, realised that all the minimums and maximums visible in my graphs are most likely in fact from the spectrum of my light source and not the interference. (Yes, I really felt pretty stupid after hearing that.) I really hadn't even thought about this possibility since I had measured the spectrum of the light from a point with no interference – but now that I think of, it the intensity must have simply been too low for the spectrometer to get any proper measurements from it.
So, I'm now pretty much left with nothing here. My supervisor isn't of much help either as he told me that he can't really do anything for me before I come up with a research question – and he is of course right. It's just that I'm kind of running out of ideas with a phenomenon this simple as there aren't that many possibilities.

I'm pretty sure I could modify the experiment and get some kind of results, and since it seems like a somewhat original experiment I'm hoping that my EE isn't completely doomed. The question remains, what could possibly be my research question? If I can in fact get the constructed/destructed wavelengths visible in my measurements (I'm quite confident that it is possible) there would be at least something for me to write about, but I don't quite see how to formulate a "sharply focused" research question out of that. So I would really appreciate any suggestions you might have.

In any case, thank you if you took the time to read all this. I wouldn't be surprised if this post turned out to be longer than what my EE is right now...