Question

in 1909, robert millikan performed an experiment involving tiny, charged drops of oil. the drops were charged because they had picked up extra electrons. millikan was able to measure the charge on each drop in coulombs. here is an example of what his data may have looked like.. why did the drops of different charges

Answer 1

The oil drops in Millikan's 1909 experiment had different charges because they randomly picked up or lost different numbers of electrons when exposed to radiation. The total charge of a drop relates directly to the number of extra or lost electrons, owing to the constancy of an electron's charge.

Step-by-step explanation:

In 1909, Robert Millikan performed what would be known as the oil drop experiment. The experiment aimed to determine the elementary electric charge, that is, the electric charge of a single electron. The oil drops were charged with different quantities of electrons, which is why they had different charges.

The difference in charges happened because when the oil drops were exposed to the radiation source, they picked up or lost electrons at random. Therefore, the number of extra (or lost) electrons wasn't the same for each drop. Because the charge of an electron (or proton, for that matter) is a constant, any variation in the total charge of the drop can be attributed to a variation in the number of extra or lost electrons.

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