I was a bit more concerned then amused.<p>Having worked with some folks who do these high precision measurements, it&#x27;s concerning that they never found the cause for disagreement. Pinning down systemic error is really, really, really hard.<p>As Feynmann pointed out in reference to the oil drop experiment(<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Oil_drop_experiment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Oil_drop_experiment</a>):<p>&quot;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&#x27;s a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It&#x27;s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan&#x27;s, and the next one&#x27;s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one&#x27;s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.<p>Why didn&#x27;t they discover the new number was higher right away? It&#x27;s a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it&#x27;s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan&#x27;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 close to Millikan&#x27;s value they didn&#x27;t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that...&quot;