AP's 259th and 260th books of science-- chronicling 4 famous physics ex
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Archimedes Plutonium@21:1/5 to
All on Mon Sep 25 23:04:43 2023
AP's 259th book of science// Chronicling 2 of the worst physics experiments of the 20th century. The Rutherford-Geiger-Marsden and Bohr gold leaf foil experiment and the Water Electrolysis experiment.
AP's 260th book of science// Chronicling the two of the best famous Physics-Chemistry Experiments-- Cavendish Gravity Constant experiment 1798, and Millikan-Fletcher 1909 electric monopole oil drop
Cavendish came within 99% (or sigma error of 1%) of today's value of 6.67408 x 10^-11 m^3 kg^-1 s^-2 (2014 CODATA source).
As for the Millikan-Fletcher experiment of electric monopole oil drop it is interesting that the value continues to go higher and higher. And gives my excellent reason for saying the true values is 1.618*10^-19 C, following the Golden Mean number of 1.
618.
--- quoting Wikipedia on precision of oil drop experiment ---
In a commencement address given at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1974 (and reprinted in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! in 1985 as well as in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out in 1999), physicist Richard Feynman 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 t