[edjrage]

So it worked despite all the bias and fraud. You could even call it luck. The reproducibility implied by the fact that at least some of it is true is not a "nice-to-have", it's the whole point of it working. We wouldn't call it true if we couldn't confirm it to be true.

To me it seems you're conflating reproducibility with insight. Of course insight is also key, and it may be useful even if it's wrong, as long as it causes others to recursively have new insights and create hypotheses and do experiments that eventually turn out to be true.

[scarmig]

I would say that Millikan had a fundamentally true insight, and he published it to the world with an experiment whose results weren't reproducible.

[edjrage]

Exactly. Which renders the logic behind the experiment false. But since the insight was true, it eventually led to experiments that yielded true results. (Notice I didn't say the insight was false, I supported your idea by emphasizing that even false insights can be useful.)