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 bigg...