Question

Milikans Oil Experiment. What can you conclude about the existence of a smallest unit of electric charge, of which other charges are multiples?

Answer 1

When we say that this thing is postively charge and this is negatively charge what does that mean ? It simply means that either the system has less electrons or has excess of electrons. So we clearly know that charge is transferred by an electron since protons are bound in the nucleus they can't carry charge, basically only electron carrry charges, now electron is an elementary particle it can't be further divided and also it contains a certain charge value on it so that means when a charge is transferred it will always be a certain number of electron that is transferred we can also say it as an integral multiple of electron is what that is transferred. and Milikans oil experiment was based on to find that certain charge value of electron. he came really close to the now accepted value of electron charge he gave value of 1.5924*10^-19C which is 0.6 % less than now accepted value of 1.602*10^-19C.