which these authors find in the oil-drop work is obtained by computing
from some twenty-five observations on the times of fall, and an equal number on the times of rise, of a particle which, before we had made any
computations at all, we reported upon[117] for the sake of showing that the Brownian movements would produce just such fluctuations as Ehrenhaft had observed when the conditions were those under which he worked. When I compute
by equation (29), using merely the twenty-five times of fall, I find the value of
comes out 26 per cent low, just as Zerner finds it to do. If, however, I omit the first reading it comes out but 11 per cent low. In other words, the omission of one single reading changes the result by 15 per cent. Furthermore, Fletcher[118] has shown that these same data, though treated entirely legitimately, but with a slightly different grouping than that used by Zerner, can be made to yield exactly the right value of