[codelieb]

If you folks have any questions about the Feynman Lectures Website, the online edition of The Feynman Lectures on Physics, the current ("New Millennium") printed edition (or ePub or Mobi editions), then you can ask me. I am the person who is primarily responsible for them. The same goes for the previous ("Definitive") edition. I've been working with The Feynman Lectures on Physics for about 23 years.

[mutant_glofish]

Very cool! I'm a huge Feynman fan, and he has a dedicated corner in my library. If I'm not mistaken, I probably own a book you coauthored with him. Thank you for the all the effort you've put into making the Feynman Lectures accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

This is not a question about the website, but I think there might be a chance you know something about it. In Feynman's "Cargo Cult Science" speech [1], there's this anecdote about ways we might fool ourselves in science, using measurements of the elementary charge as an example:

> We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

> Why didn’t they discover that the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We’ve learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don’t have that kind of a disease.

Do you happen to know anything about this plot of measurements of elementary charge? There have been some efforts to reproduce it [2], but IMO they don't really match Feynman's description.

[1]: https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

[2]: e.g. https://scipython.com/blog/measurements-of-the-electron-char...

[codelieb]

Thanks for buying my book. You're very welcome for the website. I don't know specifically to what plot Feynman was referring, but it may have been one he made himself.

[vmilner]

Is it worth putting a link to the “lectures on computation” and “lectures on gravitation” books on the site? Unless I’ve missed it they don’t seem to get a mention.