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.

More like this

A couple of weeks ago, io9 ran a piece about the old accusations that Robert Millikan manipulated his data for the electron charge with the headlineDid a Case of Scientific Misconduct Win the Nobel Prize f
I found this in the most recent issue of The Physics Teacher (September 2009). Surprisingly, there were several good articles in this issue. One article discusses a doable version of the Millikan Oil drop experiment.
I spent most of yesterday helping out with an on-campus workshop for high school teachers and students. Seven high school physics teachers and seventeen high school students spent the day doing a half-dozen experiments to measure various physical constants.

Man I miss journal access.