The
oil drop experiment was an
experimentAn experiment is a methodical procedure carried out with the goal of verifying, falsifying, or establishing the validity of a hypothesis. Experiments vary greatly in their goal and scale, but always rely on repeatable procedure and logical analysis of the results...
performed by Robert Millikan and
Harvey FletcherHarvey Fletcher was an American physicist. Known as the "father of stereophonic sound" he is credited with the invention of the audiometer and hearing aid...
in 1909 to measure the
elementary electric chargeThe elementary charge, usually denoted as e, is the electric charge carried by a single proton, or equivalently, the absolute value of the electric charge carried by a single electron. This elementary charge is a fundamental physical constant. To avoid confusion over its sign, e is sometimes called...
(the charge of the
electronThe electron is a subatomic particle with a negative elementary electric charge. It has no known components or substructure; in other words, it is generally thought to be an elementary particle. An electron has a mass that is approximately 1/1836 that of the proton...
).
The experiment entailed balancing the downward gravitational force with the upward
buoyantIn physics, buoyancy is a force exerted by a fluid that opposes an object's weight. In a column of fluid, pressure increases with depth as a result of the weight of the overlying fluid. Thus a column of fluid, or an object submerged in the fluid, experiences greater pressure at the bottom of the...
and
electricElectromagnetism is one of the four fundamental interactions in nature. The other three are the strong interaction, the weak interaction and gravitation...
forces on tiny charged droplets of oil suspended between two metal
electrodeAn electrode is an electrical conductor used to make contact with a nonmetallic part of a circuit...
s. Since the density of the oil was known, the droplets' masses, and therefore their gravitational and buoyant forces, could be determined from their observed radii. Using a known electric field, Millikan and Fletcher could determine even the charge on oil droplets in
mechanical equilibriumA standard definition of static equilibrium is:This is a strict definition, and often the term "static equilibrium" is used in a more relaxed manner interchangeably with "mechanical equilibrium", as defined next....
. By repeating the
experimentAn experiment is a methodical procedure carried out with the goal of verifying, falsifying, or establishing the validity of a hypothesis. Experiments vary greatly in their goal and scale, but always rely on repeatable procedure and logical analysis of the results...
for many droplets, they confirmed that the charges were all multiples of some fundamental value, and calculated it to be , within 1% of the currently accepted value of . They proposed that this was the charge of a single electron.
Background
Starting in 1900, while a
professorA professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...
at the
University of ChicagoThe University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
, Millikan, with the significant input of Fletcher, and after improving his setup, published his seminal study in 1913.
Millikan's experiment involved measuring the force on oil in a glass chamber while two electrodes rest on either side, with the electrical field calculated, he could measure the droplet's charge, the charge on a single electron being(1.592×10−19 C),
At the time of Millikan and Fletcher's oil drop experiments, the existence of subatomic particles was not universally accepted. Experimenting with
cathode rayCathode rays are streams of electrons observed in vacuum tubes. If an evacuated glass tube is equipped with two electrodes and a voltage is applied, the glass opposite of the negative electrode is observed to glow, due to electrons emitted from and travelling perpendicular to the cathode Cathode...
s in 1897,
J. J. ThomsonSir Joseph John "J. J." Thomson, OM, FRS was a British physicist and Nobel laureate. He is credited for the discovery of the electron and of isotopes, and the invention of the mass spectrometer...
had discovered negatively charged "
corpusclesThe plum pudding model of the atom by J. J. Thomson, who discovered the electron in 1897, was proposed in 1904 before the discovery of the atomic nucleus. In this model, the atom is composed of electrons The plum pudding model of the atom by J. J. Thomson, who discovered the electron in 1897, was...
", as he called them, with a mass about 1840 times smaller than that of a
hydrogen atomA hydrogen atom is an atom of the chemical element hydrogen. The electrically neutral atom contains a single positively-charged proton and a single negatively-charged electron bound to the nucleus by the Coulomb force...
. Similar results had been found by
George FitzGeraldGeorge Francis FitzGerald was an Irish professor of "natural and experimental philosophy" at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, during the last quarter of the 19th century....
and
Walter KaufmannWalter Kaufmann was a German physicist. He is most well known for his first experimental proof of the velocity dependence of mass, which was an important contribution to the development of modern physics, including special relativity.-Life:In 1890/91 he studied mechanical engineering at the...
. Most of what was then known about
electricityElectricity is a general term encompassing a variety of phenomena resulting from the presence and flow of electric charge. These include many easily recognizable phenomena, such as lightning, static electricity, and the flow of electrical current in an electrical wire...
and
magnetismMagnetism is a property of materials that respond at an atomic or subatomic level to an applied magnetic field. Ferromagnetism is the strongest and most familiar type of magnetism. It is responsible for the behavior of permanent magnets, which produce their own persistent magnetic fields, as well...
, however, could be explained on the basis that charge is a continuous variable; in much the same way that many of the properties of
lightLight or visible light is electromagnetic radiation that is visible to the human eye, and is responsible for the sense of sight. Visible light has wavelength in a range from about 380 nanometres to about 740 nm, with a frequency range of about 405 THz to 790 THz...
can be explained by treating it as a continuous wave rather than as a stream of photons.
The so-called
elementary chargeThe elementary charge, usually denoted as e, is the electric charge carried by a single proton, or equivalently, the absolute value of the electric charge carried by a single electron. This elementary charge is a fundamental physical constant. To avoid confusion over its sign, e is sometimes called...
e is one of the fundamental physical constants and its accurate value is of great importance. In 1923, Millikan won the
Nobel PrizeThe Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
in
physicsPhysics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
in part because of this experiment.
Aside from the measurement, the beauty of the oil drop experiment is that it is a simple, elegant hands-on demonstration that charge is actually quantized.
Thomas EdisonThomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. In addition, he created the world’s first industrial...
, who had previously thought of charge as a continuous variable, became convinced after working with Millikan and Fletcher's apparatus. This experiment has since been repeated by generations of physics students, although it is rather expensive and difficult to do properly.
In the last two decades, several computer-automated experiments have been conducted to search for isolated fractionally charged particles. So far (2007), no evidence for fractional charge particles was found over more than 100 million drops measured.
Fraud allegations
There is some controversy over the use of selectivity in Millikan's results of his second experiment measuring the electron charge raised by the historian
Gerald HoltonGerald Holton is Mallinckrodt Research Professor of Physics and Research Professor of the History of Science, Emeritus, at Harvard University.Born 1922 in Berlin, he grew up in Vienna before emigrating in 1938...
. Holton (1978) pointed out that Millikan disregarded a large set of the oil drops gained in his experiments without apparent reason. Allan Franklin, a former high energy
experimentalist"Experimentalist" is a blanket term for all sorts of scientists engaged more in experimental activity than in the theoretical side of their sciences....
and current philosopher of science at the
University of ColoradoThe University of Colorado Boulder is a public research university located in Boulder, Colorado...
has tried to rebut this point by Holton. Franklin contends that Millikan's exclusions of data did not affect the final value of
e that Millikan obtained but concedes that there was a Tyler Tuttle and he was substantial "cosmetic surgery" that Millikan performed which had the effect of reducing the statistical error on
e. This enabled Millikan to quote the figure that he had calculated
e to better than one half of one percent; in fact, if Millikan had included all of the data he threw out, it would have been to within 2%. While this would still have resulted in Millikan having measured
e better than anyone else at the time, the slightly larger uncertainty might have allowed more disagreement with his results within the physics community. David Goodstein counters that Millikan plainly states that he only included drops which had undergone a "complete series of observations" and excluded no drops from this group.
Millikan's experiment and cargo cult science
In a commencement address given at the
California Institute of Technology (Caltech)The California Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Pasadena, California, United States. Caltech has six academic divisions with strong emphases on science and engineering...
in 1974 (and reprinted in
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character is an edited collection of reminiscences by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. The book, released in 1985, covers a variety of instances in Feynman's life...
), physicist
Richard FeynmanRichard Phillips Feynman was an American physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics...
noted:
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of - this history - because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong - and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that...
, the accepted value for the elementary charge is , where the 40 indicates the uncertainty of the last two decimal places. In his Nobel lecture, Millikan gave his measurement as , which equals . The difference is less than one percent, but it is more than five times greater than Millikan's
standard errorThe standard error is the standard deviation of the sampling distribution of a statistic. The term may also be used to refer to an estimate of that standard deviation, derived from a particular sample used to compute the estimate....
, so the disagreement is significant.
External links
- Thomsen, Marshall, "Good to the Last Drop". Millikan Stories as "Canned" Pedagogy. Eastern Michigan University.
- CSR/TSGC Team, "Quark search experiment". The University of Texas at Austin.
- The oil drop experiment appears in a list of Science's 10 Most Beautiful Experiments originally published in the New York Times.
- Engeness, T.E., "The Millikan Oil Drop Experiment". 25 April 2005, Paper by Millikan discussing modifications to his original experiment to improve its accuracy.
- Millikan Oil Drop Experiment in space. A variation of this experiment has been suggested for the International Space Station
The International Space Station is a habitable, artificial satellite in low Earth orbit. The ISS follows the Salyut, Almaz, Cosmos, Skylab, and Mir space stations, as the 11th space station launched, not including the Genesis I and II prototypes...
.