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To me the real lesson of the Millikan experiment is that science moves slower than you think. It does take decades, sometimes, for people to notice the tiny bu
by mechanical_fish 15y ago
To me the real lesson of the Millikan experiment is that science moves slower than you think. It does take decades, sometimes, for people to notice the tiny but consistent discrepancy between their expectation and the data, but that's not necessarily a sign of failure; that's just the time scale of success.
When Millikan's experiment was new it was new; people hadn't done it before, there was slop to work out, and the theory was miles behind. These things take time to converge on a consensus. Sometimes a long time. Also, money.
- InclinedPlane 15y agoThe lesson isn't that Millikan screwed up, everyone can screw up at some point. The lesson is that folks had a chance to show Millikan was wrong simply by rerunning his experiment and coming up with the correct result. But they didn't. They didn't have the integrity to challenge Millikan's result. They turned every dial they could to fudge the numbers enough to end up with a result near Millikan's. How would such dynamics pan out for experiments that aren't amenable to the sort of polite gradual adjustment as Millikan's was? The real lesson is that this sort of thing (fudging numbers, lack of scientific integrity) is quite prevalent but most of the time goes unnoticed because there isn't something as dramatic as with the Millikan experiment to show it plainly.