Abstract
In this section I shall discuss a famous experiment. It was carried out by Kaufmann in 1905 and was intended to be crucial between two rival theories of the electron: a classical theory elaborated by Abraham and the new relativistic theory proposed by Lorentz and Einstein.
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Notes
See Feyerabend [1972].
See Kaufmann [1905].
See Planck [1906a].
See Planck [1906b].
See Planck [1907].
This is explained in detail above in Section 2.
Thus we have two conflicting intuitions: the intuition that, if any one of Kaufmanns results is satisfactorily explained, then all of them are; and the intuition that Planck’s achievement would have been greater, had he not worked backwards from at least one experimental result to the determination of the auxiliary hypothesis K E . I would argue (see also Section 2) that the conflict ought to be resolved in favour of the second intuition; this anyway does not involve much modification of the first intuition.
In fact, this procedure is as follows: T A is Abraham’s hypothesis. K Ai is of the form R(w)&(w = w Ai ), where w Ai is a numerical value uniquely determined by T A &R(w)&a i &b i . That is: (TA&P(w)&ai&bi)→(w = w Ai See equivalence (9).
Though this involved an idealisation, as indicated above.
See Lorentz [1906], p. 212.
See Zahar [1973].
See Lorentz [1906], p. 339, Note 86.
See Bucherer [1908].
See Bucherer [1908], p. 525.
See Lorentz [1914].
I argue this more fully in my [1973].
My italics and translation. Planck’s actual words were: “Wäre [w] bei einer Theorie für alle Ablenkungen gleich gross, so könnte man sagen, dass für diese Theorie alle von Herrn Kaufmann gemessenen Ablenkungen vollständig erklärt werden…”. See Planck [1907], p. 213.
In fact both zi, and yi are obtained through an averaging process over a (finite) range of measured entities. Thus z i and yi0 are not, strictly speaking, the ‘observed’ coordinates of a single electron.
Cf. p. 84.
See e.g. (65)E.
See e.g. (65)A.
See (20).
See (16).
See (25) and (26).
See p. 83.
e.g. y3 = 0.0506, y AJ = 0.0526, y = 0.0555. Cf. Planck [1906b], p. 129.
See (iii).
For the meanings of ai and b i see (16).
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© 1978 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Zahar, E. (1978). ‘Crucial’ Experiments: A Case Study. In: Radnitzky, G., Andersson, G. (eds) Progress and Rationality in Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 58. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9866-7_4
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