A New Look at the Sub-electron Controversy Of Milikan & Ehrenhaft

Abstract

The measurements of the electronic charge e, by Ehrenhaft and Millikan in the early nineteen hundreds generated a bitter controversy between the orthodox and the atomic points of views. Guided by the Pauli-Fermi neutrino model for beta-decay in this paper we speculate that the introduction of a small hypothetical force is adequate to account for most of the contentious differences between the observations of Millikan and Ehrenhaft.