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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. We've learned those tricks
nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.