Robert Andrews in Millika

1998/01/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Biografiak

American physicist born in a family of Scottish origin in Illinois in 1868. He studied at the Universities of Berlin and Gottingen and received his doctorate from Columbia University in 1895. As a student, he showed no tendency to physics, but he was a physics professor in some schools at the end of primary studies and even a doctorate when he obtained a doctorate degree at the University of Chicago.

Between 1906 and 1911 he began to develop his most prestigious research. Thanks to the study known as “The oil drop experiment”, Milliki managed to measure the load of the electron.

Through the microscope, the observer sees a drop of oil without knowing how many electrons the oil contains. Millikan used x-rays to later create the electric field and observed that this area affected the drop of oil. Milliki thought that the weight of the oil drop and the power from above that generates the area on the oil drop should be equal, since in this way you can easily know the electric charge of the oil drop. If it is a repeated attempt, the value of the unit load can be known; in other words, Milliki achieved through this study to know the charge of an electron: 1.6. 10-19 C approximately.

In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in recognition of the discovery of the charge of the electron and its informative work throughout his career.

In 1921 he took over the Norman Bridge Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. There he learned about the research carried out by Victor Franz Hess. Hess said that in space there is special radiation and that some rays coming to us are an example of this. Millikan called cosmic rays and that is the terminology we have used since then.

During the last years of his life he went on to study the type of radiation in the different layers of the atmosphere. For this purpose he organized numerous expeditions all over the world, being the best known ones made in India and Australia. He was also a U.S. representative in the scientific cooperation commissions between 1922 and 1932.

He was 85 when Herio went to California in 1953.