These droplets then drifted slowly between the plates under the influence of gravity. Two horizontal metal plates formed a parallel capacitor, creating a uniform electric field between them.
Gravity, Electric Field, and Oil Drop: How Millikan Balanced Forces to Quantize Charge
By precisely adjusting the voltage across the plates, Millikan could manipulate the electric field to perfectly balance the gravitational force on a single droplet, causing it to hover motionless. The calculated charges were not a random continuum but were always integer multiples of a single, fundamental value.
This smallest charge—approximately 1. Millikan designed his experiment to resolve this debate definitively, aiming to prove that electric charge was quantized, existing only in specific, indivisible packets.
Gravity, Electric Field, and the Oil Drop: Balancing Forces in Millikan's Experiment
The Revolutionary Discovery The data revealed a startling pattern. He repeated this process for numerous droplets, each time isolating a different particle.
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