Millikan's oil-drop experiments are justly regarded as a major contribution to twentieth-century physics. They established the quantization of electric charge, the existence of a fundamental unit of charge, and also measured that unit of charge precisely.
A while ago, I interned a summer at a Caltech thing. I was studying physics at the time and met another physics undergrad there, who showed me some of the cooler bits of the school.
Fun fact: Millikan's lab notebooks showed he selectively used data points that fit his hypothesis, which is now considered a classic example of confirmation bias in sicence lol.
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Supposedly, an early Millikan oil drop experiment apparatus (in a basement at Caltech) | Spyke
Millikan's oil-drop experiments are justly regarded as a major contribution to twentieth-century physics. They established the quantization of electric charge, the existence of a fundamental unit of charge, and also measured that unit of charge precisely.
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A while ago, I interned a summer at a Caltech thing. I was studying physics at the time and met another physics undergrad there, who showed me some of the cooler bits of the school.
Fun fact: Millikan's lab notebooks showed he selectively used data points that fit his hypothesis, which is now considered a classic example of confirmation bias in sicence lol.