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As a counter point to this, by all accounts Millikan had worked out the charge on an electron but had not validated it by experiemnt. Knowing what thw result sh
by dougSF70 4y ago
As a counter point to this, by all accounts Millikan had worked out the charge on an electron but had not validated it by experiemnt. Knowing what thw result should be, he then designed an experiment to arri ve at this result. Not very scientific at all.
- sidlls 4y agoHypothesis: the charge on an electron is X, as predicted by Y. Experiment: observe the charge on an electron. The experiment could have shown the charge to be other than X: in which case (assuming repeated experiments confirmed it) the hypothesis was wrong and a new one would have been needed. "Y" wasn't invented out of nothing: it was built on other observations, hypotheses, and theories. Seems pretty scientific to me, but I'm biased (since I'm a physicist). I think at some point we (physicists) are just going to have to realize we're at the point where the models we have maybe should be taken for what they are (incomplete), and re-examine the data and construct new hypotheses to design experiments for. I'm certainly not the physicist to do that (I haven't been practicing for almost 15 years now, and even when I was I was not the Einstein caliber physicist to do it), but there will be someone or a group who do that. I hope soon, as I'd like to see it!