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home > Media services > News > EUN makes Millikan oil drop experiment available to schools EUN makes Millikan oil drop experiment available to schools Xplora was awarded a grant from the Agilent foundation to develop in cooperation with the University of Kaiserslautern, the Millikan oil drop experiment, which can be used to measure the charge of an electron. The ‘web’ experiment is now available from the Xplora portal, it will enable physics teachers and students to easily and remotely run the experiment and to insert their results into a database. The objective of Millikan's oil-drop experiment (1909) was to prove the existence of an elementary charge (charge unit) and to give it an amount. It was first performed by American scientist Robert A. Millikan who carefully balanced the gravitational and electric forces on tiny charged droplets of oil suspended between two metal electrodes. Knowing the electric field, the charge on the droplet could be determined. Robert Millikan was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1923 mostly for this experiment. The Millikan oil drop experiment is one of those strange experiments in physics, which is extremely important in order to understand the concept of the elementary charge, but rather expensive and difficult to run properly. The new development proposed by Xplora can be achieved by designing the Millikan experiment as a web experiment, connected with a database of results, which allows the student to access the results of all previous users. This way, the necessary mass of results will be available to everyone, allowing the original reasoning and verifying the results of the historical experiment. Xplora is now looking for interested schools, science museums and teacher training institutes who volunteer to host the experiment and therefore enable schools around the world to access it. If your school, science museum or teacher training institute is interested in getting the experiment and taking the RELATED responsibility, please contact Karl Sarnow for more details. The Agilent foundation is a non-profit organisation funded by Agilent Technologies, a global manufacturer of measurement equipment. The Agilent Technologies Foundation focuses on pre-university science education around the world and supports among others programmes for strategic initiatives linked to change and improvement in student learning. Xplora portal:
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