Millikan was a physicist. In 1923, as Fisher’s stock tips were being devoured across the United States, Millikan was collecting a Nobel Prize. For all his achievements, Millikan is most famous for an experiment so simple that a schoolkid can attempt it: the “oil drop” experiment, in which a mist of oil droplets from a perfume spritzer is given an electrical charge while floating between two electrified plates. Millikan could adjust the voltage between the plates until the droplets were suspended, without moving—and since he could measure the diameter of the droplets, he could calculate their
Millikan was a physicist. In 1923, as Fisher’s stock tips were being devoured across the United States, Millikan was collecting a Nobel Prize. For all his achievements, Millikan is most famous for an experiment so simple that a schoolkid can attempt it: the “oil drop” experiment, in which a mist of oil droplets from a perfume spritzer is given an electrical charge while floating between two electrified plates. Millikan could adjust the voltage between the plates until the droplets were suspended, without moving—and since he could measure the diameter of the droplets, he could calculate their mass, and thus also the electrical charge that was precisely offsetting the pull of gravity. This, in effect, allowed Millikan to calculate the electrical charge of a single electron. I was one of countless students who attempted this experiment in school, but in all honesty I was unable to get my results quite as neat as Millikan’s. There are a lot of details to get right—in particular, the experiment depends on correctly measuring the diameter of the tiny oil droplet. Mismeasure that, and all your other calculations will be off. We now know that even Millikan didn’t get his answers quite as neat as he claimed he did. He systematically omitted observations that didn’t suit him, and lied about those omissions. (He also minimized the contribution of a junior colleague, Harvey Fletcher.) Historians of science argue about the seriousness of this cherry-picking, ethically and practically. ...
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
