Millikan performed the famous oil drop experiment in 1909, finding a value of 1.5924 x 10^-19C for the elementary electric charge, or the charge on the electron. We now think the number is a bit higher, the current figure being 1.6022 x 10^-19C. Millikan could never explain to himself or to anyone else why he was off by almost 1%, the difference being more than five times greater than his standard error. It has been assumed that the difficulty of the experiment was the cause of the error, but Millikan always dismissed that. If we study the set-up, we find that the experiment is indeed difficult and expensive to prepare, but once it is correctly prepared, it should be expected to give an answer without such a large error. This is what Millikan's standard error is meant to tell us. We should have expected an error of <.1%.

Millikan never identified the cause of the error, and no one else has done so since then. The oil drop experiment was soon replaced by other experiments, and the question of Millikan's failure has not been a topic for many decades. Currently, the number is derived from the Josephson effect or the Hall effect, and neither effect is analogous in any way to Millikan's experiment.

My recent studies have allowed me to solve this longstanding mystery. The crucial factor is that the oil drop experiment was performed vertically, in line with gravity. In fact, Millikan arrayed his electrical force to balance the gravitational force. The reason this explains the error is that I have shown that what has been called gravity up to this time is actually a compound force. Newton's gravitational field is, in fact, a vector addition of two fields: the gravity field of the Earth and the charge field of the Earth. The charge field has been hidden up to this time in the compound field.

This means that Millikan was not, as he thought, balancing two fields, his electrical field up and gravity down. He was balancing three fields: his electrical field up, gravity down, and the Earth's charge field up. In another paper, I have derived a number for the Earth's charge field: .009545 m/s². In a different paper I have shown that this charge field is the mechanical cause of the difference between the Bohr magneton and the magnetic moment of the electron. The Bohr magneton is a theoretical number and the magnetic moment is an experimental number, found in the Earth's field. But since the Bohr magneton does not include the Earth's field, the two numbers cannot match. They are off by the amount of the Earth's charge field.

Millikan's number is said to be wrong by .612%. The charge field of the Earth is .0974% of gravity, but it isn't affecting Millikan's gravity number because he is already using the compound field number of Newton, which takes both vectors into account. The charge field is only affecting Millikan's electric field. He thinks all the force up is coming from his field, but part of it is coming from the Earth's field. He assigns all that force up to his electric field, and then divides to find the elementary charge. Because his electric field is too big, his elementary charge is too big. Yes, Millikan's number is too high. You thought I was going to push his error toward the current number didn't you? No, we need a .0974% correction lower. The correct number should be closer to 1.5908 x 10^-19.

This means that the modern experiments are even more wrong than Millikan. The methods using the Faraday constant and Avogadro constant are shot with through with errors, and even Wikipedia admits¹ that in practice the electron charge is not computed from the constants, but the reverse. The method called "shot noise" is admitted to be more imprecise than the oil drop method,¹ so we need not deal with it here. With the Josephson effect we are looking at voltage oscillations in superconductors. As we saw with my analysis of the Podkletnov effect, superconductors increase the effect of the charge field of the Earth. If you freeze a portion of the atmosphere, the charge field must pass through it more easily, since it has less resistance. This increases the force of the field, and adds to the margin of error in the experiment due to charge. With the Hall effect, we have a quantum effect of electrons at low temperatures in strong magnetic fields. Again, a magnetic field at a low temperature creates a superconducting effect which increases the error of the experiment. As in so many other ways, we are not getting nearer the truth, we are diverging from it.

A good reader may say, "All very interesting, but in your paper on the Bohr magneton you showed that the error was caused by this same charge field of the Earth. However, we know that the magnetic moment of the electron is greater than the Bohr magneton, not less. Why did Bohr predict a number that was too low and Millikan predict a number that was too high?" Good question, but easily answered by studying the mechanics. Millikan was balancing his number against gravity, in vector opposition. Bohr was not. Bohr's math has no gravitational component. Bohr predicted a force too low, because he didn't include the charge field of the Earth. In the opposite way, Millikan included the charge field in his number without knowing it.

¹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_charge

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