Robert Andrews Millikan (1868–1953) was an American physicist. His study of the elementary electronic charge and the photoelectric effect won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1923.
Born in Illinois, Millikan studied at Oberlin College, Ohio, and Columbia University. After working at Berlin and Gottingen, he became an assistant to physicist Albert Michelson at the University of Chicago.
In 1909, Millikan started experiments to establish the electric charge carried by a single electron. He was appointed professor in 1910, and, in 1921, he moved to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech,) where he established the experimental physics laboratory. At Chicago, he refined J. J. Thomson’s oil drop technique and demonstrated that the charge on each droplet was a multiple of the same basic unit, which is the charge on the electron and could be measured precisely.
In studies of the photoelectric effect, Millikan confirmed Albert Einstein’s theoretical equations and gave an accurate value for Planck’s constant. For all these achievements, he was awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physics. He also investigated cosmic rays, a term that he coined in 1925.
As chair of the executive council of Caltech 1921–45, Millikan turned Caltech into one of the leading research institutions in America.
Johns Hopkins science historian Robert H Kargon wrote The Rise of Robert Millikan: Portrait of a Life in American Science (1982.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Robert Andrews Millikan
Fullness of knowledge always and necessarily means some understanding of the depths of our ignorance, and that is always conducive to both humility and reverence.
—Robert Andrews Millikan
Topics: Knowledge
Cultivate the habit of attention and try to gain opportunities to hear wise men and women talk. Indifference and inattention are the two most dangerous monsters that your ever meet. Interest and attention will insure to you an education.
—Robert Andrews Millikan
Topics: Wisdom, Habit
The change from the individual life of the animal to the group life of civilized man, which becomes a life of ever-expanding complexity as our scientific civilization advances, would obviously be impossible unless the individual learned in ever-increasing measure to subordinate his impulses and interests to the furtherance of the group life.
—Robert Andrews Millikan
Topics: Society
I conceive the essential task of religion to be “to develop the consciences, the ideals, and the aspirations of mankind.”
—Robert Andrews Millikan
Topics: Religion
If the growth of modern science has taught anything to religion and to the modern world, it is that the method of progress is the method of evolution, net the method of revolution. Let every man reflect well on these things before he assists in stabbing to death, or in allowing to starve to death, organized religion in the United States.
—Robert Andrews Millikan
War will disappear, like the dinosaur, when changes in world conditions have destroyed its survival value.
—Robert Andrews Millikan
Topics: War
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