Robert Andrews Millikan

Robert Andrews Millikan (March 22, 1868 – December 19, 1953) was an American experimental physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1923 for the measurement of the elementary electric charge and for his work on the photoelectric effect. He served as president of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) from 1921 to 1945.

Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment.

Quotes

• Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment.
  • 1923 Nobel Prize lecture Robert A. Millikan - Nobel Lecture: The Electron and the Light-Quant from the Experimental Point of View (PDF). Nobelprize.org. Retrieved on 30 January 2014.

• Since the origin of the "penetrating rays" was still uncertain, Dr. Russell Otis and myself in the summer of 1923 went to the top of Pike's Peak for the sake of making absorption experiments upon these radiation at the highest altitude to which we could carry large quantities of absorbing materials. For if the rays were not of cosmic origin they did not need to be more penetrating than are the gamma rays from radioactive materials, while if they were of cosmic origin the sounding balloon experiments of Bowen and myself had shown that they must be very much harder (more penetrating) than anybody had thus far assumed. What was needed was absorption experiments to determine just what sort of rays they actually were.
  • (January 1926)"High frequency rays of cosmic origin". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 12 (1): 48–55. (quote from pp. 49–50)

• Cosmic rays
  • Lecture to the British Association, 1928

• In 1832 the English astronomer Airy, in making a report to the British Association on the state of astronomical science throughout the world, remarked that he was unable to say anything about America astronomy because, so far as he knew, no public observatory existed in the United States. It was in the 1840's that the Cincinnati Observatory, the Naval Observatory in Washington, and the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were founded—the three pioneer institutions in a development that has continued with increasing acceleration ever since.
  • (3 September 1948)"The Progress of Physics from 1848 to 1948". Science 108 (2801): 230–233.

Quotes about Millikan

• The California Institute of Technology (CalTech) rose to prominence when Robert A. Millikan was called to Pasadena in 1921 as new university president. Millikan was known for his far-reaching ambitions both as a physicist and as a science manager. He put CalTech on the map as a top university by inviting the world's most renowned scientists for guest lectures and by hiring internationally distinguished scientists to new chairs. With theoretical physicist Paul Epstein, a pupil of Sommerfeld's, Millikan brought modern atomic physics to CalTech in the early 1920s, and with Kármán, he pursued the same strategy a few years later in order to lure the best available aerodynamicist from Europe to Pasadena.
  • Michael Eckert (27 June 2007). The Dawn of Fluid Dynamics: A Discipline Between Science and Technology. John Wiley & Sons. p. 201. ISBN 978-3-527-61074-7.