When Authority Figures Make Mistakes

Once an authority figure says something, we tend to believe it. You’d think this is not true in science and maths, but sadly, you’d be wrong.

 

Remember Millikan’s famous oil drop experiment to measure the charge of an electron from school days? Well, Millikan got the answer wrong. There was nothing wrong with the experiment itself, it was just that he’d used the incorrect value for the viscosity of air! It should have been easy for others to notice and correct this, right? Yes, but only at the beginning. But the error wasn’t caught early, and Millikan’s number becomes the accepted value everywhere. From that point onwards, it’s not easy to change it. Richard Feynman points out that:

“It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan.  If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little 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 the correction happen one shot? Why did it happen in steps?

“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 closer to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard.”

 

Since all of quantum mechanics is highly mathematical (and unintuitive), it’s easy (and unavoidable) to believe things because the maths says so. Even more so if it comes from a giant of maths like John von Neumann. At a time when physicists were still struggling to make their peace with quantum mechanics, an alternative called the “hidden variables theory” was being explored. (It’s not necessary to know that that means for this blog). What is relevant is that von Neumann, a rock star mathematician of the era, announced a mathematical “proof” that “no hidden variables theory could be an accurate description of reality” in 1932. Except he had made an elementary error in his “proof”…

 

In this case, the error was found almost immediately. The refutation was published. And ignored. Why? Because the refuter was a woman. Because she came from a field unrelated to quantum mechanics. Because of the aura around von Neumann. And lastly because most physicists were not interested in alternatives to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics: there was so much work to be done, why bother about interpretations?

 

The sad part in all this? Those alternate interpretations, the “hidden variables theories” thus had to wait almost a generation before a new set of physicists started to work on them.

 

Even in science and maths, human nature can’t be eliminated.