Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [24]
That would certainly explain something that is otherwise inexplicable. Millikan aborted the experimental run on twenty-five of the droplets in the work reported in the 1913 paper. According to Goodstein, Millikan preferred to use droplets that showed a change in charge, gaining or losing an electron (as he saw it) during the measurement. Millikan may also have judged some droplets to be too small or too large to yield reliable data, Goodstein says. If they were too large, they would fall too rapidly to be reliably observed. Too small, and their fall (and thus the charge result) would be affected by random collisions with air molecules. Goodstein interprets the italicised statement as an assertion that there were only fifty-eight ‘complete enough’ sets of data.
But that doesn’t add up: Goodstein undoes his defence by stating that in order to make the ‘too large’ or ‘too small’ distinction, all the data would need to have been taken in the first place. Millikan had complete data on seventeen droplets that did not make it into the publication. ‘I cannot interpret Millikan’s italicized statement as anything other than a lie,’ says Caroline Whitbeck, a Professor of Ethics at Case Western Reserve University:
What would be the point of saying such a thing, let alone putting the statement in italics? Millikan’s statement makes sense only as a denial that he has dropped data points. Feeling a need to explain his data selection (which had served him so well), but being unable to fully explain the operation of intuition, Millikan lied.
Millikan certainly did not convince his peers straight away. The arguments with Ehrenhaft rumbled on long enough for Millikan’s Nobel Prize to be delayed for three years – it eventually came in 1923. Even after that, things were far from settled. One prominent physicist remarked in 1927 that this ‘delicate case’ had ‘lasted 17 years, and up to now it cannot be claimed that it has been finally decided in favour of one side or the other’.
But here’s the point: Millikan was right about the electron and its charge. Few laboratories managed to replicate Ehrenhaft’s results, but students now replicate Millikan’s results in school laboratories across the world. No one now believes that the fundamental unit of charge is anything other than Millikan’s e.
To get his Nobel Prize, Millikan had to play hard and fast with what we might call ‘accepted practice’. The science writer George Johnson includes Millikan’s work in his book The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, but he is under no illusions about the dark side of Millikan’s ambition. ‘The beauty here lies with the experiment not the experimenter,’ Johnson says.
Scientific anarchy may not be beautiful, but it gets the job done. In 2005, the ethicist Frederick Grinnell made an interesting point in a letter to Nature. In basic research, he wrote, intuition is ‘an important, and perhaps in the end a researcher’s best, guide to distinguishing between data and noise’. By intuition, Grinnell means here the dropping of data points based on a gut feeling that they are inaccurate, just as Millikan did. It’s not pretty, and it’s not ideal – perhaps not something researchers would be proud to display. But it is what happens.
Grinnell wrote his letter in response to a piece of research about fraud in science. ‘Scientists Behaving Badly’, by Brian Martinson, Melissa Anderson and Raymond de Vries, caused quite a stir when it was published in Nature in June 2005. While the US Office of Research Integrity looks at just three types of fraud – falsification, fabrication and plagiarism – Martinson and his co-authors felt that researchers ‘can no longer afford to ignore a wider range of questionable behaviour that threatens the integrity of science’. And so they took a poll, mailing a survey to several thousand scientists to ask what bad things they had done in the previous three years.
Around half the recipients responded. As Martinson pointed out, it is safe to assume that misbehaving