• Bustedknuckles@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    17 hours ago

    The most famous version of this might be Millikan’s oil drop experiments to measure the mass of an electron. His notebook is full of qualitative judgments of his measured values and which ones to include in the final determination. The mass of an electron settled down pretty smoothly

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      7·
      11 hours ago

      Ah, yeah, this sounds like it’s making a similar point, though whatever article I read long post-dated Feynman.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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:[21][22]

      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 …

      I’ve read Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, but that won’t be what I’m recalling, as I’m pretty sure that that didn’t have graphs. I’m thinking of an article that I think was on the Web, and had graphs showing values over time walking toward the correct value. I do think that it dealt with the hard sciences, not social sciences, so it might have included that oil drop experiment, and I think that it had several different experiments.