Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
This lecture covers the determination of the elementary electrical charge and the Avogadro constant through the oil-drop method, focusing on the experiments conducted by R.A. Millikan. The method's reliance on Stokes's law, the capture of ions from the air to change the charge on a drop, and the atomic structure of the electric charge are discussed. The lecture also delves into the systematic redetermination of fundamental constants to achieve higher accuracy. Various factors affecting the evaluation process are reviewed, emphasizing the importance of eliminating errors in constant factors. The oil-drop method's equation, the significance of the multiple relationship of charges, and the implications of deviations from Stokes's law are explored.