1 janv. 1930 - Robert Millikan

Description:

American experimental physicist.
His oil drop experiment was perhaps the most famous scientific work of his career.
Earlier experiments by J.J. Thomson had shown that atoms contain some type of negatively charged particle and that these particles were of a mass significantly smaller than that of a hydrogen atom.
Exactly what the magnitude of that negative charge remained unknown.
It also wasn't completely accepted yet that subatomic particles (particles smaller than an atom, that are contained within an atom) even existed, so the whole field of atomic theory was really coming of age in the early part of the 20th century.
It was the goal of Millikan to quantify the charge of an electron, and they more or less succeeded.
This determined the unit charge of the electron in 1909 with his oil drop experiment at the University of Chicago. Thus allowing for the calculation of the mass of the electron and the positively charged atoms.

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