This is really cool, but I'm confused how we haven't stumbled into this before? Wouldn't this be quite obvious under some napkin math or does it have more to do with the specific hydrogels they were using?
> 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.
This sort of thing happens all the time in chemistry, material science and condensed matter physics. There are infinite possibilities of putting things together, and only some of them are interesting. It takes a lot of manual work to isolate some phenomena like this.