History Interesting anecdotes in the history of physics?

[sbrothy]

A famous one.

(Rudolf Peierls documents)

“A friend showed Pauli the paper of a young physicist which he suspected was not of great value but on which he wanted Pauli's views. Pauli remarked sadly, 'It is not even wrong'



Peter Woit used the phrase for one of his books.

Sorry for a little noise (it is a linguistics forum after all though).

I've always loved this story. Apochryphal or not. As Wolfgang Pauli was Austrian, one would assume he expressed it as "nicht einmal falsch".

If you want something said "succint, verbose for terse" German is a good language. They still love their abbreviations (I guess old habits die hard.) They still say "OrPo" and "KriPo" when meaning OrdnungsPolizei and KriminalPolizei, LKV / PKW for LastKraftWagen (truck) and PersonKraftWagen for car (although "auto" may have taken over in daily speech).

They are excused though as they have some extremely long words. :)

More scary though, a lot of political parties still go by weird acronyms with omnious overtones.

Incidentally, I think we Danes are the only people who use the "bil" ([bi:l]) of "automobil(e)" in daily speak, as opposed to all other countries who use "auto". Thanks to some obscure vote in a paper or something. I couldn't find the reason in English.

I'll see if I can dig it up...

EDIT: Found this one, if nothing else:

List of German Abbreviations


EDIT2: Heh, "Stabi": Staatsbibliothek. (State Library) :P

 

[pinball1970]

Sorry for a little noise (it is a linguistics forums afterall though).

I've always loved this story. Apochryphal or not. As Wolfgang Pauli was Austrian, one would assume he expressed it as "nich enmail falsch".

If you want something said "succint, verbose for terse" German is a good language. They still love their abbreviations (I guess old habits die hard.) They still say "OrPo" and "KriPo" when meaning OrdnungsPolizei and KriminalPolizei, LKV / PKW for LastKraftWagen (truck) and PersonKraftWagen for car (although "auto" may have taken over in daily speech).

They are excused though as they have some extremely long words. :)

More scary though, a lot of political parties still go by weird acronyms with omnious overtones.

Incidentally, I think we Danes are the only people who use the "bil" ([bi:l]) of "automobil(e)" in daily speak, as opposed to all other countries who use "auto". Thanks to some obscure vote in a paper or something. I couldn't find the reason in English.

I'll see if I can dig it up...

There are different versions of the Pauli story, in another he was at a conference.

In English we say car, short for motor car. More formally in the police and military they say vehicle, I think in America also.

 

[Hornbein]

That should be nicht einmal falsch.

 

[sbrothy]

That should be nicht einmal falsch.

EDIT: As I admit below: you're completely correct. Typo on my part. Don't know why it was so hard to see! :)

Still, there a some differences between Austrian and German, not to mention Luxembürgich(?)

Hah, "Luxembürgish" alone is a googlewhack!

 

[Hornbein]

No wait... I don't see what I did wrong.....? Though I realize there a some differences between Austrian and German (not to mention Luxembürich(?)) Wasn't that exactly what I wrote?

Hah, "Luxembürgish" alone is almost a googlewhack!

I know basic German and "nich enmail falsch" is not correct. I dunno about Austria.

 

[sbrothy]

I know basic German and "nich enmail falsch" is not correct. I dunno about Austria.

EDIT: So yes, this must have come off as obnoxiously arrogant and incredibly bezzerwisserisch. Again, I apologize.

I think the whole point of the anecdote is about creative use of language. I wouldn't be surprised if some boundaries were pressed.

And yeah, I'm from Denmark. We had 4 German channels and one Danish. Guess where I learned my German. :) I was, in fact, 21 before it dawned upon me that "Sesam Straβe" wasn't German at all but in fact English and called "Sesamy Street". In my defense we didn't have many channels those days.

 

[sbrothy]

That should be nicht einmal falsch.

Oh, sorry! Now is saw what I did wrong! My apologies. I'll correct it immediately!

EDIT: All the way up. *sigh*.

EDIT2: Alright, that was a lot of noise for not very much information. I vote we leave this, if for nothing else my verbose, heartfelt and beautiful apologizes to @Hornbein

Sorry man.

 

[pines-demon]

Very short : Upon losing the use of his right eye, Leonhard Euler said

Now I will have less distraction.

_{I know I have said to avoid anecdotes of mathematicians but Euler did too much for physics to be excluded.}

 

[pines-demon]

Now I will have less distraction.

More context:

Highly respected at the Academy and adored at Catherine [the Great]’s court, Euler now held a position of great prestige and influence that had been denied him in Berlin for so long. He in fact was the spiritual if not the appointed leader of the Academy.

Unfortunately, however, there were setbacks on a personal level. A cataract in his left (good) eye, which already began to bother him in Berlin, now became increasingly worse, so that in 1771 Euler decided to undergo an operation. The operation, though successful, led to the formation of an abscess, which soon destroyed Euler’s vision almost entirely. Later in the same year, his wooden house burned down during the great fire of St. Petersburg, and the almost blind Euler escaped from being burnt alive only by a heroic rescue by Peter Grimm, a workman from Basel. To ease the misfortune, the Empress granted funds to build a new house (the one shown in Figure [from another source] with the top floor having been added later). Another heavy blow hit Euler in 1773 when his wife Katharina Gsell died. Euler remarried three years later so as not to be dependent on his children.

In spite of all these fateful events, Euler remained mathematically as active as ever, if not more so. Indeed, about half of his scientific output was published, or originated, during this second St. Petersburg period, among which his two “bestsellers,” Letters to a German Princess and Algebra.

The joke payed, he improved his productivity.

From: W. Gautschi, "Leonhard Euler: His Life, the Man, and His Works", SIAM Review, 50 (2008), doi: 10.1137/070702710

 

[pines-demon]

PARENTAL PROHIBITIONS

Curiosity driven geometry

Étienne Pascal was a French tax officer and father of the famous mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal. He decided that he will teach his son himself. He wanted Blaise to learn many languages first so Étienne decided to hide all his mathematics books from the house until Blaise reached adulthood (15). This prohibition sparked in Blaise so much curiosity in math, that by the age of twelve he was already proving theorems of geometry by himself. Étienne realizing that his son was good at it, relented a gave Blaise a copy of Euclid's Elements.

Law studies leads to major law

John Powell Hubble was an American insurance executive, father of the famous astronomer Edwin Hubble. He promoted his son to excel in many domains, Edwin quickly became a great athlete (winning track and field competition and leading the University of Chicago basketball team), good with languages and good with math and sciences. After Edwin earned a bachalor of sciences from University of Chigago, John was very sick and made his son promise to not waste time and go into law school. Edwin wanted to go into astronomy, but did not want to challenge his father and went into Oxford to study jurisprudence. During his studies, Edwin had to return to take care of his family while his father was sick. After John's death, Edwin decided to go to work at University of Chicago's observatory and pursue his studies in astronomy. Edwin's law making eventually made it into Hubble's law.

From plumber to Einstein

Leonard Susskind was born into a poor family in Bronx, NY. His father was a plumber, so he had to work as a plumber too. His father wanted him to become a technician so that they could also offer heating services. Susskind had very bad grades, except in math. He took a contest and was accepted into City College of New York as an engineer. While studying he still had to work with his father. However during this time, teachers discovered how good he was in theoretical sciences and encouraged him to go into physics. At some point he had to tell his father that he was going to be a physicist, his father replied

Hell, no, you ain’t going to work in a drugstore.

Susskind replied,

No, not a pharmacist, a physicist.

His father asked

What’s a physicist?

Susskind replied

Like Einstein.

Susskind mother started to worry and said

We’re going to be broke.

His husband looked at her with a plumbing pipe in his hand and said,

Shut up—he’s going to be Einstein.

No more questions asked after that.

 

[pines-demon]

THE ESSENTIALS

We were missing the founding anecdotes of physics, here are three classics:

Bath epiphany

Roman architect Vitruvius (1 century BC) records a famous story about Archimedes (two centuries before) in De Architectura (Book IX):

Hiero, after gaining the royal power in Syracuse, resolved, as a consequence of his successful exploits, to place in a certain temple a golden crown which he had vowed to the immortal gods. He contracted for its making at a fixed price, and weighed out a precise amount of gold to the contractor. At the appointed time the latter delivered to the king's satisfaction an exquisitely finished piece of handiwork, and it appeared that in weight the crown corresponded precisely to what the gold had weighed.

But afterwards a charge was made that gold had been abstracted and an equivalent weight of silver had been added in the manufacture of the crown. Hiero, thinking it an outrage that he had been tricked, and yet not knowing how to detect the theft, requested Archimedes to consider the matter. The latter, while the case was still on his mind, happened to go to the bath, and on getting into a tub observed that the more his body sank into it the more water ran out over the tub. As this pointed out the way to explain the case in question, without a moment's delay, and transported with joy, he jumped out of the tub and rushed home naked, crying with a loud voice that he had found what he was seeking; for as he ran he shouted repeatedly in Greek, "Ευρηκα, ευρηκα." ["Eureka eureka!"]

Taking this as the beginning of his discovery, it is said that he made two masses of the same weight as the crown, one of gold and the other of silver. After making them, he filled a large vessel with water to the very brim, and dropped the mass of silver into it. As much water ran out as was equal in bulk to that of the silver sunk in the vessel. Then, taking out the mass, he poured back the lost quantity of water, using a pint measure, until it was level with the brim as it had been before. Thus he found the weight of silver corresponding to a definite quantity of water.

After this experiment, he likewise dropped the mass of gold into the full vessel and, on taking it out and measuring as before, found that not so much water was lost, but a smaller quantity: namely, as much less as a mass of gold lacks in bulk compared to a mass of silver of the same weight. Finally, filling the vessel again and dropping the crown itself into the same quantity of water, he found that more water ran over for the crown than for the mass of gold of the same weight. Hence, reasoning from the fact that more water was lost in the case of the crown than in that of the mass, he detected the mixing of silver with the gold, and made the theft of the contractor perfectly clear

Validity of the story: unlikely. First, where did Vetruvius got that story from? Secondly, it has been questioned if such an experiment could have been done in antiquity. Archimedes would have needed to be very precise in his measurements. Galileo himself who invented the hydrostatic balance during the Renaissance based on Vitruvius account was very skeptical of the story. Which leads me to the next story.

Leaning tower experiment

Vicenzo Viviani student and biographer of Galileo records a fascinating experiment to prove the law of falling bodies. Galileo wanted to test the Aristotelian idea that heavier bodies fall faster than lighter bodies. He went to the leaning Tower of Pisa and carried an experiment throwing two spheres of different materials, one heavier than the other.

Viviani writes in 1642 after the dead of Galileo:

And then, to the dismay of all philosophers, very many conclusions of Aristotle were by him (Galileo) proved to be false through experiments and solid demonstrations and discourses, conclusions which up to then had been held for absolutely clear and indubitable; as, among others, that the velocity of moving bodies of the same material, of unequal weight, moving through the same medium, did not mutually preserve the proportion of their weight as taught by Aristotle, but all moved at the same speed; demonstrating this with repeated experiments from the height of the Campanile of Pisa in the presence of the other teachers and philosophers, and the whole assembly of students; and also that the velocity of a given body through different media kept the reciprocal proportion of the resistance or density of the said media, a point which he deduced from the very obvious absurdities which would (otherwise) follow as a consequence and against reason.

Validity: probably not by Galileo. There are several arguments against the validity of the story (1) Galileo did no write about it (2) none of the other students of Galileo that would have helped him wrote about it (3) being a public demo, why nobody wrote about it? (4) the balls would have taken 3 seconds to fall, would that be enough to see a difference? Actually this did not stop another student of Galileo, Vincenzo Reinieri to try the experiment in 1641 (one year before the death of Galileo) throwing a cannonball and a wooden ball, but got an inconclusive answer (he clearly did not understand Galileo's work, he discussed with Galileo about it but there is missing correspondence).

Apple blown

For the last one we have more records. It is about the famous Isaac Newton and his law of universal gravitation. The retelling from 1835 goes like this

We owe the great discovery of Newton to a very trivial accident. When a student at Cambridge, he had retired during the time of the plague into the country. As he was reading under an apple tree, one of the fruit fell, and struck him a smart blow on the head. When he observed the smallness of the apple, he was surprised at the force of the stroke. This led him to consider the accelerating motion of falling bodies; from whence he deduced the principle of gravity, and laid the foundation of his philosophy

Validity: embellished. The anecdote above is a later retellling that can be found even in textbooks. What did people close to Newton heard?

William Stukeley, well acquainted with Newton describes the situation more closely (1726 a year after the event) from his memoirs:

we went into the garden, & drank thea under the shade of some apple trees, only he, & myself. amidst other discourse, he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind.

why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground,

thought he to himself: occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a comtemplative mood:

why should it not go sideways, or upwards? but constantly to the earths centre? assuredly, the reason is, that the earth draws it. there must be a drawing power in matter. & the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the earth must be in the earths center, not in any side of the earth. therefore dos this apple fall perpendicularly, or toward the center. if matter thus draws matter; it must be in proportion of its quantity. therefore the apple draws the earth, as well as the earth draws the apple.

No blow to his head, and mostly thought apples.

References:

• Ed. by R. L. Numbers and K. Kampourakis, Newton's apple and other myths about science, Harvard University Press
• Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, (Gutenberg Project link)
• V. V. Raman, Where credit is due The Leaning Tower of Pisa Experiment, Phys. Teach. 10, 196–198 (1972)
• Isaac D'Israeli, Curiosities of Literature (1835)
• William Stukeley, Memoirs of Isaac Newton's life (1752) [Archived from The Newton Project]

 

[pines-demon]

On the physicist's death changed war policy

At the end of the 19th century, Mendeleev had predicted that chemical elements could be ordered according to his table. The Periodic Table was a success and predicted new elements. However the table was arranged by atomic weight. This was a problem because isotopes have different weights.

At the beginning of the 20th century, atomic physics was being developed and Rutherford was carrying his experiments to understand the atom(ic nucleus). Before just Rutherford could publish, Antonious van der Broek, an economist not at all trained in physics published the idea that the position of the elements in the table had something to do with the charge.

Is with this idea that the protagonist of today anecdote appears. A British physicist, Henry Moseley, set out to study matter using X-rays, finding the Moseley's law in 1913 which confirmed the Van der Broek and Rutherford's ideas and associated an atomic number to elements based on frequency. It is said that Moseley was a candidate for the Nobel Prize for this discovery.

However, during World War I, Moseley wanted to join the army. He was told:

We need engineers, not physicists.

He insisted and was admitted. Moseley tragically died in action in 1915 during the famous Gallipolli campaign where the British fought the Ottomans.

Rutherford was deeply shocked, he said that

Moseley was one of the best of the young people I ever had, and his death is a severe loss to science.

and wrote in an article in Nature (Nature 96, 33–34; 1915) :

It is a national tragedy that our military organization at the start was so inelastic as to be unable, with a few exceptions, to utilize the offers of services of our scientific men except as combatants on the firing line. The loss of this young man on the battlefield is striking example of the misuse of scientific talent.

The British government learned the lesson and during World War II military organizations assigned scientists to behind-the-lines work (leading to famous scientific war projects).

Moseley only published 8 papers.

From:

• Miral Dizdaroglu, Henry Moseley: A Patriotic Scientist Who Changed the Periodic Table, NIST (2024)
• Title based on M Wong, Physicist's death changed war policy, Nature 524, 415 (2015)

 

[Frabjous]

A thread with a link to a bunch of Physics Today quantum articles
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/physics-today-article-collection.1067882/#post-7142069

 

[pines-demon]

Ehhh! Maldacena!
I usually do not care much about string theory but this is so odd it had to made it to the list of anecdotes. When the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence (adS/CFT) was found by Juan Maldacena (1997) it was well received by the string theory community. To celebrate, at the Strings '98 conference at Santa Barbara, California; Jeffrey A. Harvey composed and sang with other scientists the following song with the tune of Macarena:

You start with the brane¹
and the brane is BPS²
Then you go near the brane
and the space is adS³
Who knows what it means
I don't I confess
Ehhhh! Maldacena!

Super Yang Mills⁴
With very large $N$.⁵
Gravity on a sphere
flux without end
Who says they're the same
holographic⁶ he contends
Ehhhh! Maldacena!

Black holes used to be
a great mystery
Now we use D-brane
to compute D-entropy⁷
And when D-brane is hot
D-free energy⁸
Ehhhh! Maldacena!

M-theory is finished⁹
Juan has great repute
The black hole we have mastered
QCD we can compute¹⁰
Too bad the glueball spectrum
is still in some dispute¹¹
Ehhhh! Maldacena!​

The New York Times provides some footnotes:

1. One of the latest crazes in superstring theory: a membrane-like object that can come in up to 9 dimensions.
2. Bogomol'nyi–Prasad–Sommerfield (named after three physicists): a specific type of supersymmetric brane (see note 4) important to Dr. Maldacena's conjecture.
3. So far the conjecture only works in a special, saddle-shaped universe called anti-de Sitter space.
4. Yang-Mills is the type of field underlying quantum chromodynamics (or QCD), the theory of the strong force. Dr. Maldacena simplified his calculations by attributing a quality known as supersymmetry to the field.
5. $N$ is the number of ''colors'' in the field theory. In QCD, quarks come in red, green and blue.
6. Maldacena's four-dimensional field theory can be thought of as a holographic projection of a higher-dimensional string theory.
7. Recently, physicists have used things called Dirichlet-branes (see note 1) to verify a prediction made by Dr. Stephen W. Hawking and Dr. Jacob Bekenstein: that a black hole's entropy (a measure of disorder) is proportional to the area of its horizon (the surrounding region from which nothing can escape).
8. One can also use D-branes to compute a thermodynamic quantity called free energy.
9. A bit of sarcasm. No one, including Dr. Maldacena, believes M-theory is anywhere near completion.
10. On a practical level, Dr. Maldacena's method may be used to simplify difficult calculations in quantum chromodynamics (see note 4).
11. Glueballs are particles made entirely from gluons, the carriers of the strong force. The glueball spectrum is the range of masses and spins (and other quantities) that these particles can assume. Whether calculations of the spectrum are reliable is still uncertain. If not, physicists may be dancing another tune at Strings '99 in Potsdam, Germany.

Added extra wikilinks.

Source: G. Johnson, New Dimension in Dance: Thinking Man's Macarena, The New York Times (1998)

 

[Hornbein]

https://physics.aps.org/articles/v18/12

The first measurement of Plank's constant. How DID Millikan do it?

 

[pines-demon]

https://physics.aps.org/articles/v18/12

The first measurement of Plank's constant. How DID Millikan do it?

I thought it was going to be about the oil-drop experiment issue (that's interesting too, he clearly messed up badly maybe I might write about it next). To my surprise, this is about the $\hbar$ measurement. I did not know Milikan was so reticent to Einstein even if he believed in Planck quantum theory. Milikan's experiment basically granted Einstein's his Nobel Prize.

I quote from the article:

In an earlier paper (January 1916) in the same volume, Millikan writes in the very first sentence that

Einstein’s photoelectric equation…cannot in my judgment be looked upon at present as resting upon any sort of a satisfactory theoretical foundation,

even though

it actually represents very accurately the behavior

of photoelectricity. Indeed, Millikan’s paper on Planck’s constant shows clearly that he is emphatically distancing himself throughout from Einstein’s 1905 attempt to couple photo effects with a form of quantum theory. What we now call the photon was, in Millikan’s view,

[the] bold, not to say the reckless, hypothesis

reckless because it was contrary to such classical concepts as light being a wave-propagation phenomenon. So Millikan’s paper is not at all, as we would now expect, an experimental proof of the quantum theory of light.

In 1912 Millikan gave a lecture at the Cleveland meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, meeting jointly with the American Physical Society, in which he clearly regarded himself as the proper presenter of Planck’s theory of radiation. With his usual self-confidence, Millikan confessed that a corpuscular theory of light was for him “quite unthinkable,” unreconcilable, as he saw it, with the phenomena of diffraction and interference. In short, Millikan’s classic 1916 paper was purely intended to be the verification of Einstein’s equation for the photoelectric effect and the determination of $h$, without accepting any of the “radical” implications that today seem so natural.

 

[fresh_42]

https://physics.aps.org/articles/v18/12

The first measurement of Plank's constant. How DID Millikan do it?

Are you sure that this was the first measurement?

My doubts are firstly, Planck already gave it a value with an accuracy of 1% or so, and his approach was empirical. Why don't you call this a measurement?

Secondly, aren't 15 years between Planck (1901) and Millikan (1916) a bit too long that nobody else has tried before?

 

[pines-demon]

Are you sure that this was the first measurement?

No, but there was large errors in the data (up to 60%) if I am reading Milikan correctly. He cited Hughes, and Richardson and Compton (1912) . Also what they could measure was $h/e$ ratio, they needed the other Milikan experiment to get $h$.

My doubts are firstly, Planck already gave it a value with an accuracy of 1% or so, and his approach was empirical. Why don't you call this a measurement?

Did he?

Secondly, aren't 15 years between Planck (1901) and Millikan (1916) a bit too long that nobody else has tried before?

Milikan offers five points that need to be checked. He says:

During the ten years which have elapsed since Einstein set up his equation the fifth of the above assertions has never been tested at all, while the third and fourth have never been subjected to careful experimental test under conditions which were even claimed to permit of an exact and definite answer,

Edit: Milikan also estimated $h$ from blackbody radiation with 0.1 % error maybe you mean this? If we have to be rigourous this experiment is more of a confirmation of Einstein's theory on the photoelectric effect.

 

[fresh_42]

Did he?

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/random-thoughts-7.1056780/page-37#post-7142934

plus he mentioned that he has given these numbers before, i.e. in 1900 or earlier.

 

[pines-demon]

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/random-thoughts-7.1056780/page-37#post-7142934

plus he mentioned that he has given these numbers before, i.e. in 1900 or earlier.

Thanks for this! Milikan was far from the first. Actually Milikan cites Planck. However he says Planck did not got it directly:

Planck's original value was very close to this, namely $6.55 \times 10^{-27}$, but it was obtained from a product $ab^4$ in which Planck used $a =7.061\times10^{-15}$ (erg./cm.${}^3$ degree${}^4$) and $b=.294$ cm degrees.

Where $a=4\sigma/c$ ($\sigma$ being the Stefan-Boltzmann constant), and not sure what $b$ is but their experimental values had from 2 to 8% uncertainty.

Note that Milikan paper is titled: A Direct Photoelectric Determination of Planck's "$h$'"
Emphasis on Direct.

Edited for details.

 

[fresh_42]

Thanks for this! Milikan was far from the first. Actually Milikan cites Planck. However he says Planck did not got it directly:

No, he derived it from Lummer / Pringsheim (1900). However, $1-\dfrac{6.55}{6.626}\approx 1.47\%$ so he was quite accurate with what he came up with. I haven't checked Lummer/Pringsheim, so I only assume that they measured wavelengths by what Planck quoted. Don't you think that whether this figure is a direct measurement or derived from a direct measurement is a bit academic? How would you measure Jouleseconds directly without using other quantities like e.g. $c$?

 

[pines-demon]

No, he derived it from Lummer / Pringsheim (1900). However, $1-\dfrac{6.55}{6.626}\approx 1.47\%$ so he was quite accurate with what he came up with. I haven't checked Lummer/Pringsheim, so I only assume that they measured wavelengths by what Planck quoted. Don't you think that whether this figure is a direct measurement or derived from a direct measurement is a bit academic? How would you measure Jouleseconds directly without using other quantities like e.g. $c$?

Just to clarify I am not saying that Planck was not first or that he did not get a good value. But there is the question of the error bar of those measurements to begin with. That's what Milikan is also contesting. Milikan was working with purely "fundamental quantities" and with very low error bars.

It is not about accuracy but about precision.

 

[pines-demon]

Oil drop affair

J. J. Thomson measured in 1987 a charged "corspucle" but could only determine its mass over charge ratio, which turned up to be smaller of that of an hydrogen ion. Robert A. Milikan took up the challenge to demonstrate the quantization of charge and measure it, using an elaborate capacitor. He atomized oil drops and let the drops fall through ionized air in between the capacitor plates. The droplets got charged by integers of an elementary charge $e$.

This experiment would serve as evidence for the existence of the electron (unit of electric chage) and Milikan would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1923 for this measurement and for the photoelectric experiment above.

However, Milikan's value was of $0.99 e$ compared to the current value of $e$ (remember now this is an exact quantity under SI). One would think this would be corrected in follow-up experiments, but it was not straight away as Richard Feyman writes:

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...

Source: Feynman "Cargo Cult", California Institute of Technology commencement speech (1974).

Here is a supporting graph from the StackExchange discussion:

You even find Birge 1929 publishing an even lower value after spearking with Milikan.

Feynman argues that Milikan probably used the wrong value for the viscosity of air and that follow up scientists tried to not deviate much from Milikan's value. However the large error bars that appear on the left are the striking discovery of checking Milikan's notebook in 1978. Where many data points and experimental details were omitted from the final publication for unknown reasons. This information would have provided much larger error bars.

 

[pines-demon]

It is interesting for me that both of Milikan's experiments are complementary cautionary tales for any scientist.

From the photoelectric effect we see a man trying to prove a theory wrong and getting the opposite results, and publishing it anyway (and later in life supporting the theory because experiment say so). From the oil drop experiment we get somebody hiding away important data. Also we get that people should not trust values of important scientists, blind tests are essential.

 

[Hornbein]

The same thing happened with the speed of light. So these days the experimenters encode the experimental results so they don't know what numbers they are getting until it's all over.

I often read in mainstream media that scientists are testing widely accepted theories like general relativity. Usually instead they're testing new equipment, seeing whether it gets the right answer. They want to measure a well-known quantity.

 

[WernerQH]

Feynman argues that Milikan probably used the wrong value for the viscosity of air and that follow up scientists tried to not deviate much from Milikan's value.

Brian Petley (an experimentalist) gave this story a different spin:

In evaluating his results, Millikan had assumed that the measurement of the viscosity of air by one of his colleagues, Harrington (1916) was the most accurate. The latter used the method which required measuring the torque transmitted across the air gap between two concentric cylinders when the outer cylinder was rotated. Houston (1937) and others later showed that Harrington had overlooked, or rather underestimated, two important sources of error, one due to an end effect and the other due to air being dragged round by the rotating cylinder, which increased its moment of inertia. These led to Harrington's value being too low by 0.4%, and Millikan's value for the elementary charge being too low by 0.6%. This systematic error remained undetected for about fifteen years (1915--31) and, because of the great importance of the elementary charge $e$, this systematic error had many far reaching effects. One useful result of the error was that all of the experiments concerned with the charge on the electron were performed a little more carefully, and the sources of error examined a little more closely, than they might otherwise have been. Consequently Harrington appears to be destined to be remembered as one who got it wrong rather than one who nearly got it right -- pour encourager les autres !

B.W. Petley 1985 The Fundamental Physical Constants and the Frontier of Measurement, (Bristol: Adam Hilger)

 

[pines-demon]

Lorentz computers

Terrence Tao used this story early this year as an example of one of the first computationally-assisted calculations ever:

It is well know that hydrodynamics is hard. Leonhard Euler developed Euler equations for fluids and still failed to solve a plumbing problem he was tasked to repair. Up to the end of the 19th century–beginning of the 20th century, fluid science was dominated by hydraulics (experimental tables and engineering solutions).

Hendrik Lorentz, well-known for the Lorentz equations and so many other contributions to electrodynamics, retired about the 1920s and was called to work on a dike in the Netherlands. Lorentz writes:

In all fairness I should confess that I was intimidated by it, because a physicist is not used to problems with this level of complexity and with so few solid facts.

It is well-known that the Zuiderzee (the northern bay) led to many floods (as the country is below sea level) and engineers needed to improve their infrastructure. The project consisted in transforming the bay into a closed lake, thus shifting the tides in the surroundings.

Lorentz took the known equations of fluid dynamics and linearized them. The equations had to be integrated along the network of gullies to obtain a reliable estimate of the tidal movement. However the calculations could only be done by hand! So Lorentz led a commission of human computers to tackle the calculation. He writes,

The numerical calculations were so lengthy, that we came close to the ultimate limit of what can be done in this way. I myself had no part in this. I did try once or twice to set up and work out such a calculation, but then it would turn out that I had made a mistake, so that it had to be done all over again by others.

Thanks to this computation, the Afsluitdijk (the closure dike as it is know called) was successfully completed in 1933. This project not only represents one of the first successes of numerical hydrodynamics (not hydraulics) but also it is an amazing example of the early need of floating point arithmetic (due to quantities differing by many orders of magnitude). Unfortunately, Lorentz died before the completion of the project.

References:

• C. Beenakker, The Zuiderzee project, Instituut-Lorentz
• F. Alkemade, A Century of Fluid Mechanics in The Netherlands, Springer

 

[Hornbein]

The US Army Corps of Engineers built a physical model of San Francisco Bay. It's still around I think.

 

[DaveE]

The US Army Corps of Engineers built a physical model of San Francisco Bay. It's still around I think.

Yes, open for visitors. But they don't really use it anymore. Something about computer FEA being cheaper and better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Army_Corps_of_Engineers_Bay_Model

 

[Swamp Thing]

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3104441

In 1858 a Parisian inventor, Henri Giffard, patented the injector, a device to feed water into steam boilers. In 1908 Henri Poincaré, in his Thermodynamique, presented an original theoretical analysis of the injector.

That a scientist of Poincaré’s stature would take interest in a steam-engine apparatus that had been introduced fifty years earlier may seem surprising. However, Poincaré was only one of a large number of scientists and engineers intrigued by the device. For it was observed from the very outset that the operation of the injector was paradoxical. As one engineer commented: “Seldom has an invention caused so much astonishment and wild speculation among mechanics, and even among scientists, as the injector did. ... It was regarded as a case of perpetual motion—the means of doing work without power, or, as the Americans expressed it, by the same means a man could raise himself by pulling on his bootstraps. The purpose of Poincare’s analysis was to show that the paradox of the injector could be explained on the basis of the laws of thermodynamics.