Einstein and Millikan

In the previous post, I promised to say something more about Einstein and the photoelectric effect. It turns out that I already wrote about this, back in 2005. That post is the end of a long chain of links about the history of photons.

This is a good thing, because it frees me from having to try to type a new post with a baby on my lap. You're kind of getting short-changed, though, so to make up for the lack of new content, here's a relevant footnote from Chapter 1 of the book-in-progress:

Millikan thought the Einstein model lacked "any sort of satisfactory theoretical foundation," and described its success as "purely empirical," which is pretty nasty by physics standards. Ironically, those quotes are from the first paragraph of the paper in which he conclusively confirms the predictions of the theory (R.A. Millikan, Physical Review 7, 18 (1916)).

And now, back to baby duty.