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Who really wrote Maxwell's equations? · Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe

0:05
Speaker 1: And I gotta tell you Maxwell is hard to read
0:09
Speaker 1: for weird, weird reasons. Maxwell, it's not all mathematical, it's
0:15
Speaker 1: mostly words and with a little bit of math, but
0:18
Speaker 1: the math is confusingly written. And Maxwell makes ridiculous amounts
0:24
Speaker 1: of mathematical mistakes. The first one I thought, I'm like,
0:28
Speaker 1: I must be wrong. This is Maxwell, And then I realized, no,
0:32
Speaker 1: every paper is eighty pages long and has eighty mistakes
0:36
Speaker 1: in it.
0:37
Speaker 2: Like, oh no, it's good to know you could be
0:40
Speaker 2: famous and make tons of mistakes.
0:43
Speaker 1: And it's actually inspiring. But yeah, Maxwell had this amazing
0:48
Speaker 1: mind to take these crazy ideas from Faraday, which no
0:52
Speaker 1: one had thought of things this way, and put it
0:55
Speaker 1: in math terms. And I have nothing but the utmost
1:01
Speaker 1: respect and love for Maxwell, and also reading him can
1:06
Speaker 1: give you a stomach.
1:06
Speaker 3: In That's a little snippet from our conversation today about
1:10
Speaker 3: the history of science, specifically understanding who really came up
1:15
Speaker 3: with Maxwell's equations, how much did he rely on the
1:18
Speaker 3: experiments done before him, and how much did the theorists
1:21
Speaker 3: after him clean up his work. Welcome to Daniel and
1:25
Speaker 3: Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.
1:41
Speaker 2: Hello, I'm Kelly Waiter Smith and I don't know anything
1:44
Speaker 2: about Faraday or Maxwell or any of the people that
1:47
Speaker 2: we're going to be talking about today, though I seem
1:49
Speaker 2: to remember Faraday being associated with the cage of some sort. Daniel,
1:52
Speaker 2: did we let him out of the cage? Eventually he's
1:56
Speaker 2: still in there?
1:56
Speaker 3: Oh my god, somebody let him out.
1:59
Speaker 2: Hi.
2:00
Speaker 3: I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I've been taught
2:02
Speaker 3: the standard lore of physics history.
2:05
Speaker 2: WHOA Does every physics class teach standard physics history lore?
2:10
Speaker 2: Or are there some classes where you just do the
2:12
Speaker 2: actual science with no history.
2:14
Speaker 1: No.
2:14
Speaker 3: I feel like there's a standard set of anecdotes that
2:17
Speaker 3: get passed down from generation to generation. You get a
2:21
Speaker 3: little bit of the flavor of the people when you're
2:23
Speaker 3: learning about the equations sometimes, but mostly it's just the equations,
2:27
Speaker 3: and it's usually not the equations the way those folks
2:30
Speaker 3: wrote them. It's usually always in the modern notation, which
2:33
Speaker 3: I find a little confusing, because, like, you know, Newton
2:36
Speaker 3: didn't write equations mathematically. He wrote sentences and he used
2:40
Speaker 3: verbs and stuff like this, and so it's funny to say,
2:43
Speaker 3: and then Newton wrote down this equation, It's like, well,
2:45
Speaker 3: that didn't actually happen, did it? So? Yeah, it's confusing,
2:49
Speaker 3: all right.
2:49
Speaker 2: So we're about to talk to a historian of physics
2:52
Speaker 2: who has a bunch of amazing stories we're going to
2:54
Speaker 2: hear today. But do you have a favorite history of
2:56
Speaker 2: physics story?
2:57
Speaker 3: I do have a favorite. Actually, I'm not sure it's
3:00
Speaker 3: family friendly. It's a story of one guy who actually
3:03
Speaker 3: goes on to win the Nobel Prize, who every evening
3:07
Speaker 3: would come in and urinate on the competitors experiment so
3:11
Speaker 3: that they weren't ready to run for the day. No,
3:14
Speaker 3: the lore is that this was captured on video, though
3:16
Speaker 3: I've never actually seen the video myself, but yeah, this
3:20
Speaker 3: is a story bouncing around the halls of particle physics.
3:23
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, how long ago was this?
3:25
Speaker 3: This apparently was in the seventies.
3:27
Speaker 1: Huh.
3:27
Speaker 2: So my favorite urine based physics story is it hennick Brand,
3:31
Speaker 2: the guy who discovered phosphorus by boiling his own urine
3:35
Speaker 2: and finding it accidentally. Is that right?
3:37
Speaker 3: No, nothing that glamorous. And I won't repeat the names
3:40
Speaker 3: in the story because I've been told by other people
3:42
Speaker 3: that the story is apocryphal. But whether it's true or not,
3:45
Speaker 3: it's a story which exists in the halls of physics
3:47
Speaker 3: and is told with much relish.
3:49
Speaker 2: But my urine story is true, right, not apocryphal.
3:54
Speaker 3: I can't fact check that myself, but it sounds right.
3:56
Speaker 1: Okay, all right?
3:57
Speaker 2: We had a three D printed trophy for Bafest based
4:00
Speaker 2: on a famous painting of this man boiling his urine
4:03
Speaker 2: to discover phosphorus. Anyway, So now that we've told some
4:06
Speaker 2: good stories, some true, some maybe not so true, should
4:09
Speaker 2: we transition to the definitely true stories that Kathy has
4:12
Speaker 2: for us today?
4:13
Speaker 3: That's right. Neither of us are historians of physics, so
4:16
Speaker 3: we reached out to Kathy Joseph, who is an expert
4:19
Speaker 3: in the history of electromagnetism. How all these crazy personalities
4:23
Speaker 3: wove their work together to give us the understanding that
4:25
Speaker 3: we have today and maybe the gaps that exist in
4:28
Speaker 3: those modern stories and what we can learn from digging
4:31
Speaker 3: in detail into the past. Kathy is great because she
4:34
Speaker 3: actually goes back and reads the original papers written by
4:37
Speaker 3: these folks rather than just trusting the modern summaries.
4:41
Speaker 2: I love that about Kathy, and I love her sense
4:43
Speaker 2: of humor. So let's jump in.
4:48
Speaker 3: So it's my pleasure to welcome to the show. Kathy Joseph.
4:51
Speaker 3: She's a very well known YouTuber who has a channel
4:53
Speaker 3: about the history of physics. It's called Kathy Love's Physics.
4:57
Speaker 3: Check it out. She also was a high school physics
4:59
Speaker 3: tea for many years and is the author of the
5:02
Speaker 3: very entertaining and illuminating book The Lightning Tamers. Kathy, Welcome
5:07
Speaker 3: to the show.
5:08
Speaker 1: Thanks for having me.
5:09
Speaker 3: Thanks very much for being on. Tell us how you
5:12
Speaker 3: ended up being a physics history YouTuber when you were
5:16
Speaker 3: originally a physics PhD student and a physics high school teacher.
5:20
Speaker 3: Connect those dots for us. What is Kathy's history?
5:23
Speaker 1: Ah? Well, I've always been sort of interested in history,
5:26
Speaker 1: but much more from the historical fiction point of view.
5:31
Speaker 1: I like learning about how ordinary people lived in the past.
5:35
Speaker 1: So I always studied history by just looking into different
5:40
Speaker 1: people and enjoying their stories, and with a caveat that
5:44
Speaker 1: I know that everything I was getting was not necessarily true,
5:50
Speaker 1: which I think helped me in the future because I'm
5:53
Speaker 1: always been suspicious of everything I read. It's like, is
5:56
Speaker 1: that historically true or not? Because I did that, and
6:01
Speaker 1: then I ended up, through my various pass in my career,
6:08
Speaker 1: helping someone edit a book on non destructive testing, which
6:13
Speaker 1: is just as exciting as it sounds. It's an engineering
6:17
Speaker 1: book like how to test if different devices are okay
6:24
Speaker 1: or different items are okay, like is there a weakness
6:27
Speaker 1: in the line of train and without breaking it up?
6:34
Speaker 1: And they had different sections on different ways to test things,
6:38
Speaker 1: and I ended up editing this section on X rays
6:42
Speaker 1: and I'm like, well, let's look into the history of
6:44
Speaker 1: X rays a little bit to spice this up a
6:47
Speaker 1: little bit. And the history of X rays is amazing.
6:51
Speaker 1: There's been poetry, there's crazy, crazy things. And I started
6:57
Speaker 1: to just look into the every once in a while
7:02
Speaker 1: just for my own edification. And then I ended up
7:05
Speaker 1: being a high school physics teacher, which I loved.
7:08
Speaker 3: Wow, thank you for your service. That's really the front
7:12
Speaker 3: lines of education right there.
7:13
Speaker 1: It is the front lines of education. But it is
7:16
Speaker 1: also the place where you can make the most difference.
7:21
Speaker 1: Like if you talk to anyone who did any accomplishment
7:26
Speaker 1: in life, nine times out of ten they say they
7:29
Speaker 1: were inspired by a high school teacher.
7:30
Speaker 2: Yeah.
7:31
Speaker 3: Absolutely, And shout out to all the high school science
7:33
Speaker 3: teachers out there who are inspiring the next generation of
7:37
Speaker 3: scientists who are going to create the next layer of history.
7:40
Speaker 2: Amen, How does writing pop science differ when you're writing
7:44
Speaker 2: pop historical science.
7:47
Speaker 1: Is it a.
7:47
Speaker 2: Different set of skills that you need to be writing
7:50
Speaker 2: about the history, or a different set of research techniques?
7:53
Speaker 2: Or did you learn everything you needed when you were
7:55
Speaker 2: working on your physics PhD?
7:56
Speaker 1: Working on my physics PhD? I mean nothing except that
8:03
Speaker 1: except that the way I was trying to work on
8:06
Speaker 1: it was not working for me. And the way I
8:11
Speaker 1: approach looking at the history is as a way to
8:15
Speaker 1: teach the physics. It's always a way to teach the physics.
8:20
Speaker 1: And it's a mystery story. Every single one of them
8:23
Speaker 1: is a mystery story. Who did it? And why?
8:28
Speaker 3: I love the way that you approach history. You make
8:30
Speaker 3: it so personal because science is just people, right. It's
8:34
Speaker 3: weird people having accidents and rivalries and writing grumpy letters
8:38
Speaker 3: back and forth. And I think a lot of people
8:40
Speaker 3: when they think of the history of physics, they only
8:42
Speaker 3: take the sort of sanitized, summarized version in a textbook,
8:45
Speaker 3: like a straight line from not understanding to understanding, when
8:48
Speaker 3: really it's like a crazy zigzag that later people patched
8:52
Speaker 3: up and they removed a lot of the fun bits.
8:54
Speaker 3: So I was hoping that you would take us through
8:56
Speaker 3: some of the history of our understanding of electromagnetism, some
9:00
Speaker 3: of the messy discoveries and the fun stories. Where do
9:03
Speaker 3: you think is a fun place to jump in? Take
9:05
Speaker 3: us back to sort of like before we understood electricity
9:08
Speaker 3: at all, What were people doing to try to understand it?
9:11
Speaker 3: What were the experiments that were helping us figure it out? Well.
9:14
Speaker 1: One of the things that really surprised me was that
9:18
Speaker 1: in the seventeen hundreds, electricity wasn't really a science. It
9:23
Speaker 1: was an entertainment and it was also a way to
9:28
Speaker 1: get ahead in life. You could be a good musician,
9:31
Speaker 1: or you could be a scientist, or you could be
9:34
Speaker 1: a poet. Especially in France, the king who made Versailles,
9:39
Speaker 1: the Son King, he was very into using science as
9:44
Speaker 1: a way of entertainment and a way of showing that
9:48
Speaker 1: you were noble, if you were elite. You spoke poetry
9:54
Speaker 1: and you knew about science, and you did crazy experiments.
9:57
Speaker 1: And there's all these amazing, amazing drawings from that time period.
10:03
Speaker 1: Like the cover of my book has this little dry
10:06
Speaker 1: out circle of this woman in this beautiful giant ball
10:10
Speaker 1: gown rubbing this sphere, and then there's a child hung
10:15
Speaker 1: up by strings off the air and his feet is
10:20
Speaker 1: touching the ball, so the electricity flows through him to
10:24
Speaker 1: this little girl in another little cute, elegant gown standing
10:29
Speaker 1: on a wooden platform, having little electric pieces of paper
10:34
Speaker 1: or flaff for gold foil rise to her hand as
10:38
Speaker 1: she's electrified. And there's so many pictures. In fact, if
10:44
Speaker 1: you look really closely at the book, you can see
10:47
Speaker 1: the French letters from the words on the other side
10:50
Speaker 1: of the page, because they were printed out in little books.
10:55
Speaker 1: And I went to this museum called the Spark Museum
10:58
Speaker 1: and I got to hold an original book from seventeen
11:03
Speaker 1: forty nine. It was tiny. It was like two inches
11:07
Speaker 1: long and one inch wide. It was tiny so that
11:11
Speaker 1: they could put them in their little pockets of their
11:14
Speaker 1: elegant gowns and what have you. There whereas they could
11:20
Speaker 1: take it out and look at these incredibly intricate portraits
11:24
Speaker 1: that they put inside them.
11:26
Speaker 3: Wow, we should start making two inch versions of modern textbooks.
11:28
Speaker 3: That would be prettyhilarious.
11:30
Speaker 2: Well, it sounds like a little cheat sheet for like
11:32
Speaker 2: how to be interesting at a party. I need more
11:34
Speaker 2: pockets to hold those so that people will invite me places.
11:37
Speaker 3: Physics is definitely not the way to be interesting at
11:40
Speaker 3: a party. Yeah, it kind of it.
11:41
Speaker 2: Could be, depending on the party. There are some pretty
11:44
Speaker 2: boring parties if you're trying to entertain with electricity at
11:47
Speaker 2: a time when we don't understand electricity, well are There
11:50
Speaker 2: also a lot of stories of people hurting themselves or
11:53
Speaker 2: the children they're stringing up by their feet.
11:56
Speaker 1: Yes, not as many as you would expecting how dangerous
12:01
Speaker 1: it was, But I think that's because the time was
12:05
Speaker 1: so dangerous. They don't have antibiotics. You could die million
12:09
Speaker 1: ways from Sunday, and they sort of felt and many
12:14
Speaker 1: of them said, I want to die from electricity. There
12:19
Speaker 1: was this German scientist named Mathaa Bosa, one of my
12:22
Speaker 1: favorite scientists of all time, because he was a performer,
12:26
Speaker 1: a grand performer, and he would, for example, electrify a
12:31
Speaker 1: pretty woman by having her stand on something and while
12:34
Speaker 1: someone rubbed that sphere and then give her a kiss,
12:39
Speaker 1: and he called it venus electrificatas, and then he wrote
12:43
Speaker 1: a bad poetry about it, like, you know, I kissed
12:47
Speaker 1: venus standing on the wax. My lips trembled, my teeth
12:51
Speaker 1: almost broke. I can't remember the rest of them.
12:54
Speaker 2: It's a great kiss. And it was the idea that
12:56
Speaker 2: like he wanted to create a spark so that they
12:58
Speaker 2: would both be like wooin but it hurt.
13:03
Speaker 1: Oh, it wouldn't hurt with their hands, but it would
13:06
Speaker 1: sure hurt with your lips.
13:07
Speaker 2: Yeah.
13:08
Speaker 3: Wow. The history of flirting with physics is fascinating. But
13:12
Speaker 3: so physics is a way to like amaze and awe
13:14
Speaker 3: and entertain or at less electricity is at what point
13:18
Speaker 3: did people start to wonder like can we understand this,
13:21
Speaker 3: to do experiments to try to force the universe to
13:24
Speaker 3: reveal how it works. When did we really begin to
13:27
Speaker 3: understand it?
13:29
Speaker 1: Well, that kind of happened simultaneously. For example, there was
13:33
Speaker 1: this French scientist named du Fey, and he was the
13:39
Speaker 1: first person who made the sort of rules of electricity.
13:44
Speaker 1: He had this theory that if something was electrified and
13:48
Speaker 1: a neutral object came to it and stuck on it,
13:52
Speaker 1: the neutral object could absorb some of the electricity and
13:56
Speaker 1: then be repelled by it, which is what we think
13:59
Speaker 1: happens to And he did an experiment like that, and
14:05
Speaker 1: he had two charged rods and he's like, okay, if
14:08
Speaker 1: it repels from one. It's your repel from the other.
14:12
Speaker 1: But it didn't. It was attracted to the other, and
14:15
Speaker 1: then it was repelled by that and attracted to the
14:17
Speaker 1: first and went bouncing back and forth between these two
14:20
Speaker 1: charged objects, one made out of glass and one made
14:23
Speaker 1: of wax. So he said, there's two kinds of electricity,
14:28
Speaker 1: vitreous electricity or electricity that comes from glass, and resinous
14:34
Speaker 1: electricity or resin based, wax based. So Charles Sistine Devey
14:41
Speaker 1: was a real inspiration for Boza doing his crazy experiments.
14:46
Speaker 1: So I found that happens all through the history of science.
14:51
Speaker 1: Someone makes a real breakthrough on our understanding, but then
14:56
Speaker 1: someone else makes it popular by making a useful device
15:02
Speaker 1: or making a fun device or both. Like with X rays,
15:07
Speaker 1: they mostly thought it was fun for a while. Oops, yeah, exactly.
15:12
Speaker 1: They would go on traveling things and give X rays
15:16
Speaker 1: for you know, like a quarter, just for fun.
15:19
Speaker 3: With shockingly high doses.
15:21
Speaker 1: Right at first, No, because they couldn't figure out how
15:23
Speaker 1: to make shockingly high does. You had to stay there
15:27
Speaker 1: for a really long time because it just wouldn't work.
15:31
Speaker 1: It took a while to just figure out how to
15:34
Speaker 1: up the dose as well. But I'm Sorry, I got
15:37
Speaker 1: back onto X rays. But it's the true with all
15:40
Speaker 1: of it. It's not one at a time. And I
15:42
Speaker 1: think that is a problem with most history of science books,
15:46
Speaker 1: is that they focus on this one part of technology
15:51
Speaker 1: or one discovery or whatever, and they're not in isolation.
15:56
Speaker 1: The theory happens at the same time as the development
16:00
Speaker 1: and technologies, same times as it affecting the culture, and
16:04
Speaker 1: they're all intertwined with each other, and they're all influencing
16:07
Speaker 1: each other. And it's not linear like you were saying before.
16:12
Speaker 1: It's not like this person makes this person. Sometimes you
16:17
Speaker 1: go backwards. And one of our greatest discoveries was the
16:22
Speaker 1: discovery of the idea of electric fields, and that happened
16:26
Speaker 1: because a guy named Michael Faraday went, you know what,
16:29
Speaker 1: I've discovered so much, I should look in the history
16:33
Speaker 1: and see what it tells me.
16:35
Speaker 3: All right, So I want to hear all about the
16:37
Speaker 3: history of Michael Faraday and how that laid the groundwork
16:40
Speaker 3: for Maxwell to get maybe too much credit for Maxwell's equations.
16:43
Speaker 3: But first we have to take a quick break. All right,
17:02
Speaker 3: we're back and we're talking to historian Kathy Joseph of
17:05
Speaker 3: the YouTube channel Kathy loves physics, about how the history
17:08
Speaker 3: of electromagnetism and the history of physics in general is
17:11
Speaker 3: a little bit messier and a lot less linear than
17:14
Speaker 3: you might have thought, at least than I thought. So
17:17
Speaker 3: tell us about Michael Faraday and his experiments and what
17:20
Speaker 3: he helped us understand and how he did it.
17:23
Speaker 1: Oh, Michael Faraday is my favorite scientist of all time.
17:26
Speaker 2: I think that's the second time you've said that, isn't it.
17:30
Speaker 2: I think that means that you just are full of
17:32
Speaker 2: enthusiasm and love for your topic. I thought your favorite
17:35
Speaker 2: was the one who did the electric smooches.
17:37
Speaker 1: Oh shoot, no.
17:41
Speaker 3: It's okay. You kind of have a new favorite every
17:43
Speaker 3: ten minutes. Thoro all wonderful.
17:45
Speaker 1: Boat is one of my favorites. Okay, Michael Faraday is
17:49
Speaker 1: clear and away my favorite.
17:51
Speaker 3: Right. Why is that because he was a fan of
17:53
Speaker 3: the history as well.
17:55
Speaker 1: Partially you asked me to talk about Michael Veraday. But
18:00
Speaker 1: first start saying, I didn't start off by thinking the
18:03
Speaker 1: history of science was not important. I started off by
18:07
Speaker 1: thinking the history of science was interesting to me, and
18:12
Speaker 1: I thought it might be a little bit helpful for
18:14
Speaker 1: helping other people understand science. But it's turned into a
18:21
Speaker 1: deep belief that the science and technology doesn't come from
18:26
Speaker 1: the equations, it comes from how we got the equations.
18:29
Speaker 1: And no one has been more influential and more poetic
18:37
Speaker 1: than Michael Farday. Michael Faraday was born in the slums
18:41
Speaker 1: of London to a mostly out of work and sick father,
18:46
Speaker 1: and he went to school for a week before his
18:50
Speaker 1: teacher told his big brother to get a switch to
18:54
Speaker 1: hit him with because he called his brother Robert instead
18:58
Speaker 1: of Robert. And the other went to the mom and said,
19:03
Speaker 1: this is what I'm supposed to do. And the mom
19:05
Speaker 1: marched in there and took both kids out of school
19:08
Speaker 1: and homeschooled four kids. She had two daughters as well,
19:12
Speaker 1: who weren't allowed to go to school. And she knew
19:17
Speaker 1: no math. And he never learned math. He had a
19:20
Speaker 1: terrible math phobia. They had no books.
19:24
Speaker 3: One of the greatest physicists of all time, you're telling
19:26
Speaker 3: me you had a math phobia.
19:28
Speaker 1: Terrible math phobia. He called it hieroglyphics. He never wrote
19:34
Speaker 1: an equation. He didn't really understand them.
19:38
Speaker 3: He never wrote an equation. How does Faraday do all
19:41
Speaker 3: of his physics and leave such an imprint on history
19:43
Speaker 3: of physics without writing an equation.
19:45
Speaker 1: It's amazing. Well, Maxwell actually read Faraday and said this
19:51
Speaker 1: is mathematical. It's just not in mathematical terms. So to Maxwell,
19:59
Speaker 1: Faraday was mathematical. It just you know, you can do
20:02
Speaker 1: math and language.
20:04
Speaker 3: Does that mean that Faraday's papers are in like sentences
20:07
Speaker 3: rather than in symbols. He's like writing descriptions of what
20:10
Speaker 3: he sees and describing relationships, but just not using like
20:14
Speaker 3: equals and numbers.
20:15
Speaker 1: Right, not using equals and numbers and stuff like that.
20:19
Speaker 1: But also Faraday had this amazing knack of seeing sort
20:26
Speaker 1: of what lies underneath our world and developing it. He
20:33
Speaker 1: was a chemist and a physicist, so he had.
20:36
Speaker 3: No education except for his mom.
20:39
Speaker 1: Except for his mom.
20:40
Speaker 3: Big props to Faraday's mom.
20:42
Speaker 1: Big props who he loved. His relationship with his mom
20:46
Speaker 1: is so sweet. I'm getting out of myself. He was
20:49
Speaker 1: this poor kid. He always hanging out at a bookseller's
20:52
Speaker 1: just to look at the books in their window. And
20:55
Speaker 1: the bookseller, this guy named Merbau, gave him a job
21:00
Speaker 1: as a delivery boy and then gave him a job
21:03
Speaker 1: as a bookbinder and let him read the books that
21:07
Speaker 1: were in the bookshelf, and there was a book there
21:10
Speaker 1: by a woman named Jane Marcette called Conversations in Chemistry.
21:16
Speaker 1: There was this guy named Humphrey Davy who was a
21:19
Speaker 1: famous chemist, like the world's famous chemist, who was doing
21:24
Speaker 1: experiments with this giant battery to separate chemicals and discovered
21:29
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of different chemicals. This was eighteen hundred
21:33
Speaker 1: about his talks were the most popular thing in England,
21:38
Speaker 1: Like they had to make the road one way to
21:41
Speaker 1: deal with traffic when he gave a talk. Wow, he
21:45
Speaker 1: has letters to his parents and brother about like, you know,
21:50
Speaker 1: I'm very excited about this talk. They're reselling my tickets
21:53
Speaker 1: at fifty pounds and I'm like, oh my god, that's
21:56
Speaker 1: what they pay people for a year of labor at
21:58
Speaker 1: the time.
21:59
Speaker 2: I mean, like, he's like Taylor Swift.
22:01
Speaker 1: He was the Taylor Swift. Poets would go to him
22:05
Speaker 1: for new language and like famous poets cooler Ridge and
22:11
Speaker 1: Southby and I don't know very much about poetry, but
22:15
Speaker 1: they would go to him, and he was very, very popular.
22:19
Speaker 1: And this woman went to his talk named James Marsette,
22:22
Speaker 1: and she's like, I wish I knew some chemistry so
22:24
Speaker 1: I could understand this better. So she asked her husband
22:27
Speaker 1: to help her, and then she wrote this book, Conversations
22:30
Speaker 1: and Chemistry, and that's how Faraday learned chemistry.
22:34
Speaker 2: I didn't realize women were so important in Faraday's education.
22:37
Speaker 2: You know what.
22:39
Speaker 1: Women keep on coming up throughout everyone's story and what
22:45
Speaker 1: I found so lovely about Faraday. Lots of times when
22:48
Speaker 1: you go through the history of science partially this is
22:51
Speaker 1: a different time period, so you find people who would
22:58
Speaker 1: affect you know, sex and racism and classism and all
23:03
Speaker 1: this stuff, and they disappoint you sometimes and sometimes people
23:09
Speaker 1: you don't expect turn out to be wonderful. But when
23:13
Speaker 1: you read their private letters, you get to know who
23:15
Speaker 1: they are as people at their bad points, at their
23:19
Speaker 1: good points. And yes, I judge people. I'm a historian.
23:24
Speaker 1: That's how it works. And Faraday, I haven't read everything.
23:29
Speaker 1: He could disappoint me, but he was always everything I've read.
23:34
Speaker 1: He was kind, and he was supportive, and he was lovely.
23:38
Speaker 1: I call him the original slam poet, like slam poets
23:43
Speaker 1: do poetry without rhyming. And if you read his talks,
23:48
Speaker 1: he says stuff like I'm no poet, but if you
23:52
Speaker 1: listen carefully, a poem will form in your mind.
23:57
Speaker 2: Oh nice, Yeah, that's great.
24:00
Speaker 1: I'm like, okay, I'm waving myself the vapors. So the vapors.
24:07
Speaker 1: He loved physics as much as I love physics.
24:13
Speaker 3: And he actually did a bunch of experiments, right, He
24:15
Speaker 3: like played around in the laboratory and made these discoveries himself. Right.
24:20
Speaker 1: Yes. His big claim to fame was when he was
24:24
Speaker 1: working on trying to make glass for the English government
24:29
Speaker 1: for lenses, which he said just gave him nervous headaches.
24:32
Speaker 1: So in July fourth, eighteen thirty one, he quit Day
24:37
Speaker 1: of Independence for him and I remember that date, of course.
24:41
Speaker 1: And then he decided, He's like, okay, electricity can make magnetism.
24:47
Speaker 1: He knew if you had a coil of wire and
24:50
Speaker 1: you put electricity in it, it acted like a bar magnet.
24:53
Speaker 1: And if you put it around the iron bar, it
24:56
Speaker 1: really acted like a strong bar magnet.
24:58
Speaker 2: And had he figured that out or somebody else knew
25:00
Speaker 2: that and he just knew it.
25:02
Speaker 1: Okay, So this guy named Orsted figured out that electricity
25:05
Speaker 1: would move a magnet, and okay, Orsteed thought there were
25:10
Speaker 1: spiraling currents. One spiraling current was moving the north, one
25:14
Speaker 1: was moving the south, all sorts of stuff, and Faraday's like, no, no, no.
25:19
Speaker 1: He did an experiment and he found current could move
25:22
Speaker 1: magnet in a circle, and the magnet could move a
25:26
Speaker 1: curtains in a circle. Okay, and they call that the
25:30
Speaker 1: first motor. But like, unless you want a motor to
25:33
Speaker 1: stir mercury, it's not very useful, Like, okay, great, But
25:40
Speaker 1: what it did was it showed them that this was
25:43
Speaker 1: a very strange force. Every other force is a push
25:47
Speaker 1: or a pull. This force is like Gandalf's staff. You know,
25:52
Speaker 1: they put the staff down and then the force is
25:54
Speaker 1: going in circles around it. And this was different than
25:59
Speaker 1: how anyone thought of some physics laws at the time.
26:03
Speaker 1: And then in eighteen thirty one he found out that
26:08
Speaker 1: you could use bagnetism to make electricity because he actually
26:13
Speaker 1: had two coils on an iron ring. He's like, maybe
26:15
Speaker 1: the iron bulls moved the electricity from one coil to
26:19
Speaker 1: the other. And what happened instead was when he put
26:24
Speaker 1: electricity in one coil, he got a burst of electricity
26:27
Speaker 1: in the other, and we took it away. It got
26:31
Speaker 1: a burst of electricity in the other.
26:32
Speaker 3: Direction and So did he think about this in terms
26:36
Speaker 3: of charges or fluids or fields? What do you think
26:39
Speaker 3: was going on in Faraday's head? How did he understand this?
26:42
Speaker 1: He understood it in terms of fields, because he was
26:46
Speaker 1: the one to come up with the ideal fields.
26:49
Speaker 3: Because when I always taught the history of physics, usually
26:51
Speaker 3: Maxwell's given the credit for that. Maxwell's the one who
26:54
Speaker 3: thinks about things in terms of fields for the first time.
26:56
Speaker 3: But you're saying it's Faraday.
26:58
Speaker 1: It's one hundred percent Faraday. And Maxwell even wrote his
27:02
Speaker 1: first paper called on Faraday's Lines of Force. In Maxwell's
27:06
Speaker 1: famous eighteen sixty four paper, where he describes how light
27:10
Speaker 1: is an electromagnetic wave, he says, this is exactly like
27:14
Speaker 1: Faraday said in eighteen forty six. This is insane in principle.
27:22
Speaker 1: In his book he says, the purpose of everything I
27:25
Speaker 1: did was to get you to appreciate and understand Faraday's work.
27:32
Speaker 3: Like you were saying before, he's like translating and popularizing, right,
27:35
Speaker 3: But I want to ask you to tell us the
27:36
Speaker 3: story about Faraday and Wheatstone at the Royal Society, which
27:40
Speaker 3: seemed like a sort of turning point in the history
27:43
Speaker 3: of physics.
27:44
Speaker 1: Oh, this is great. This is great. So Faraday had
27:48
Speaker 1: created the idea of magnetic field, he created the idea
27:52
Speaker 1: of electric field. He found out that a magnetic field
27:55
Speaker 1: could change the polarization of light, so he found a
27:58
Speaker 1: connection between a Lie Tristy magnetism and light. He found
28:03
Speaker 1: that everything had a magnetic effect. He coined the term
28:07
Speaker 1: magnetic field. Fara Day did all this, This is all
28:10
Speaker 1: fair Day, Okay, all fair Day, and created the idea
28:13
Speaker 1: of electric fields and dielectrics and every other term use
28:16
Speaker 1: in chemistry like cathode, anode, electrode. All came from Fariday.
28:22
Speaker 3: Wowdy did everything, basically, he did everything. I'm sure he
28:26
Speaker 3: made his mom proud.
28:28
Speaker 1: He wrote his wife a letter that said, please stop
28:30
Speaker 1: talking to my mom about what I'm doing, because I'm
28:33
Speaker 1: getting sick of her growing too much, Like we don't
28:37
Speaker 1: need anymore.
28:39
Speaker 2: That's nice though, It's nice that his mom gets to
28:41
Speaker 2: be proud after doing all of that hard work to
28:43
Speaker 2: train him.
28:44
Speaker 1: They were so adorable with each other.
28:46
Speaker 3: It's crazy, all right. So fair Day figures this all out,
28:49
Speaker 3: and then he's at the Royal Society.
28:51
Speaker 1: He's at the Royal Society. This is eighteen forty six
28:54
Speaker 1: May of eighteen forty six, and he's supposed to introduce
28:57
Speaker 1: a talk by a guy named Charles Whetstone.
29:00
Speaker 3: Mm hmm.
29:01
Speaker 1: And Wheatstone had a well known fear of public speaking,
29:06
Speaker 1: so he was supposed to go in and he just bailed.
29:10
Speaker 1: He walks out the back door right before this week stuff.
29:13
Speaker 1: I'd been told that they now lock the back door
29:16
Speaker 1: at the Royal Society because they still have talks there,
29:19
Speaker 1: and I no, you should make it extra easy to
29:23
Speaker 1: run out the back door, because look at all the
29:25
Speaker 1: great things that happened because of this. But anyway, he bails. Now.
29:30
Speaker 1: Faraday was the most organized person you've ever encountered in history.
29:36
Speaker 1: I put my money down on that. Like he put
29:39
Speaker 1: a number next to every paragraph in his lab notebook,
29:44
Speaker 1: and he worked for I think thirty or so years. Wow,
29:49
Speaker 1: and from number one to number like, I don't know,
29:52
Speaker 1: twenty thousand or something like, wow.
29:56
Speaker 2: Why what would you do with that information?
29:59
Speaker 1: So he could refer to pass paragraphs.
30:02
Speaker 3: As I said, in paragraphs forty two right right right.
30:05
Speaker 1: Right right right exactly. And that's what he'd do with
30:08
Speaker 1: his papers too. All his papers and electricity were numbered,
30:12
Speaker 1: and then he would refer to like five different ones,
30:14
Speaker 1: and I'm like, this is hard for me to follow.
30:19
Speaker 3: I love that you've gone back and read all the
30:20
Speaker 3: original papers. That's awesome anyway. So he's at the Royal Society.
30:24
Speaker 3: Wheatstone walks out the back door.
30:26
Speaker 1: He's supposed to give an introduction, but now he has
30:29
Speaker 1: talked for an hour. And he never was unprepared. He
30:32
Speaker 1: studied how to talk. He was always very very well prepared.
30:36
Speaker 1: But he wasn't.
30:38
Speaker 3: Yeah, so he.
30:38
Speaker 1: Starts talking about the vague reflections of my mind. I
30:42
Speaker 1: think he called it something like that, and he said, Okay,
30:45
Speaker 1: imagine you have a magnet and another magnet combined with
30:50
Speaker 1: their lines of magnetic force, or you have an electric
30:54
Speaker 1: thing an electric thing, and they're combined by their lines
30:57
Speaker 1: of electric force. You vibrate one it's going to make
31:02
Speaker 1: a vibration in those lines of force, and then vibrate
31:07
Speaker 1: the other one.
31:08
Speaker 3: Mm hmm.
31:10
Speaker 1: He said, maybe, just maybe that's what light is. He said,
31:16
Speaker 1: I'm trying to keep the vibrations and remove the ether.
31:20
Speaker 3: Wow. So far Day magnetism. Fair Day has the idea
31:23
Speaker 3: of fields. Faraday figured out dipoles and dielectrics. Fair Day
31:27
Speaker 3: even came up with the idea that light is a
31:29
Speaker 3: vibration of electromagnetic fields.
31:31
Speaker 1: Yes. Wow.
31:32
Speaker 3: And he only revealed it because he gave an impromptu
31:35
Speaker 3: talk at the Royal Society because wheat Stone ran out
31:38
Speaker 3: the back.
31:38
Speaker 1: Door exactly, and then afterwards they asked him to write
31:41
Speaker 1: it up. It's like a three page paper. Wow, it's
31:46
Speaker 1: thoughts on ray vibrations. It's very short, and a good
31:49
Speaker 1: half of it is I might be wrong. Don't take
31:53
Speaker 1: it different. Don't be upset with me. I'm just speaking
31:59
Speaker 1: out of my behind. Basically, I have to fill up
32:03
Speaker 1: the time. Don't be mad at me. Well. The weird
32:06
Speaker 1: thing is in eighteen thirty seven when Faraday built the
32:11
Speaker 1: Faraday Cage, which protected him from electric fields, and came
32:16
Speaker 1: up with the idea that non metals affect the electric field,
32:21
Speaker 1: and came up with the idea of an electric field.
32:25
Speaker 1: This made everyone mad. Everyone hated it. Well two reasons.
32:31
Speaker 1: One is because he thought of so imagine two magnets
32:37
Speaker 1: and you're pushing the two norths together. You can imagine
32:41
Speaker 1: the magnetic field lines around them getting more and more compressed,
32:46
Speaker 1: and that's why they're repelling each other. And that's how
32:50
Speaker 1: we think of it, right, I mean, as physicists, or
32:54
Speaker 1: we can think of it that way as physicists. Well,
32:58
Speaker 1: they didn't think of it that back then. They didn't
33:01
Speaker 1: think of it as compressing curved lines of force. They
33:05
Speaker 1: thought of it as repelling force and attraction force. And
33:11
Speaker 1: so to think of electric repulsion and attraction as combining
33:17
Speaker 1: and compressing these lines of force seemed just ludicrous to
33:22
Speaker 1: them and seemed oppositional to the mathematical science that they
33:28
Speaker 1: had at the time. So there was lots of letters
33:32
Speaker 1: of like, I really respect you, mister Faraday, Professor Faraday, whatever,
33:36
Speaker 1: and let me tell you the twelve reasons why you're wrong.
33:41
Speaker 1: My favorite was someone wrote in about all the reasons
33:44
Speaker 1: he thought he was wrong, and he numbered the paragraph.
33:48
Speaker 2: I'm like, yes, he's speaking Faraday's lately.
33:52
Speaker 1: You're like, this is showing my love for you. I
33:55
Speaker 1: follow you. I just don't believe this. And the other
33:59
Speaker 1: part is that Faraday thought that dielectrics non conductors propelled
34:04
Speaker 1: the electric feel for it instead of reduce the electric field.
34:09
Speaker 3: All right, So draw dotted line for us between Faraday
34:12
Speaker 3: and Maxwell? Was Maxwell in the audience that day at
34:14
Speaker 3: the Royal Society? Did he read Faraday's papers? How does
34:18
Speaker 3: Maxwell then get credit for pulling together all of these
34:22
Speaker 3: ideas into what we now call Maxwell's equations.
34:25
Speaker 2: I think that's a great topic for us to tackle
34:28
Speaker 2: after the break. All right, and we're back and.
34:46
Speaker 3: We're talking to Kathy Joseph, famous YouTuber of Kathy Love's
34:50
Speaker 3: Physics fame, who's telling us all about the history of
34:52
Speaker 3: Maxwell's equations. So when we broke off, Faraday hit revealed
34:56
Speaker 3: all the big insights about how electromagntism works. And you're
34:59
Speaker 3: going to tell us about how Maxwell pulled this all
35:02
Speaker 3: together and somehow won the pr battle for history.
35:05
Speaker 1: He deserves it because Faraday had all these ideas and
35:11
Speaker 1: their amazing ideas, but in order to use it to
35:16
Speaker 1: predict other things, we need the math, and Maxwell added
35:22
Speaker 1: that secret sauce the math. And also because of Maxwell,
35:27
Speaker 1: we have vector mathematics. But anyway, let me start with
35:31
Speaker 1: what Maxwell start. He didn't go to these meetings. He
35:35
Speaker 1: had never done electricity experiments before. And what happened was,
35:40
Speaker 1: as a young man, he was probably twenty one or
35:43
Speaker 1: twenty two years old, he wrote a letter to a mentor,
35:47
Speaker 1: and Maxwell had a funny way of putting things. He
35:50
Speaker 1: was allowed to study his own things. So he said,
35:53
Speaker 1: I'm entering the unholy state of bachelorhood, and I want
36:00
Speaker 1: to attack electricity. What should I do? Should I read
36:04
Speaker 1: Faraday or should I read and Pierre and Ploaissau and
36:08
Speaker 1: all these other people who are much more mathematical. And
36:12
Speaker 1: Pierre and Faraday, by the way, were good pen pals.
36:15
Speaker 1: They met each other once, but they were good friends
36:17
Speaker 1: with each other even when they disagreed. And the person
36:21
Speaker 1: he wrote to, a guy named William Thompson, who eventually
36:24
Speaker 1: became Lord Kelvin, like the temperature had actually inspired Faraday
36:31
Speaker 1: to do some experiments and was, as he put it,
36:35
Speaker 1: full of Faraday fire. And he told Maxwell to start
36:39
Speaker 1: with Faraday. Faraday is the greatest. He was as big
36:42
Speaker 1: a Faraday fan as I am, I think. And Maxwell
36:46
Speaker 1: was like, well, aren't they in conflict with the other
36:49
Speaker 1: physicists and this guy Thompson. And He's like, no, no,
36:54
Speaker 1: they work well together. You just have to see it, right.
36:58
Speaker 1: He writes it many times, like, Sir William Thompson inspired
37:03
Speaker 1: me to do this, to see how Fairaday's view of
37:08
Speaker 1: reality worked with all these equations, with these other views
37:14
Speaker 1: of reality and messed together.
37:16
Speaker 2: It's amazing to me how often science is actually a
37:19
Speaker 2: community effort and it's easy to teach as though it's
37:21
Speaker 2: one name, because that's easier to remember, and you don't
37:24
Speaker 2: want people have to remember feig names for every concept.
37:27
Speaker 2: But it truly seems like it is a community effort.
37:29
Speaker 2: Somebody puts you on a certain path, they help you
37:31
Speaker 2: understand it, they encourage you to keep doing it, and sorry, anyway,
37:35
Speaker 2: go ahead.
37:35
Speaker 1: No, it's always such a tangled weave. That's what makes
37:38
Speaker 1: it beautiful to me. It's not like this person did
37:42
Speaker 1: this thing on this date and then that's boring too.
37:46
Speaker 1: It's much more exciting all these people interacting with each other.
37:49
Speaker 1: And what inspires people. I mean, we teach physics without
37:54
Speaker 1: knowing how anyone is inspired. And in my mind it's like, now, oh,
38:00
Speaker 1: I know a hundred stories about how different people were
38:03
Speaker 1: inspired in different ways. It's not to be repetitive inspiring.
38:07
Speaker 3: So what's Maxwell's reaction to reading Faraday? Maxwell sort of
38:11
Speaker 3: a mathematical person and fair Day's more of a poet
38:14
Speaker 3: of physics. Does Maxwell like what he reads? Is it
38:16
Speaker 3: makes sense to him? Is he struggle with it?
38:19
Speaker 1: He's immediately enthralled, He loves it. He writes this paper
38:25
Speaker 1: called on Faraday's Lines of Force. I'm a mathematical person.
38:30
Speaker 1: I don't have trouble with advanced math. It's just one
38:33
Speaker 1: of my skills. And I gotta tell you Maxwell is
38:37
Speaker 1: hard to read for weird, weird reasons. Maxwell, it's not
38:43
Speaker 1: all mathematical. It's mostly words and with a little bit
38:46
Speaker 1: of math, but the math is confusingly written. And Maxwell
38:51
Speaker 1: makes ridiculous amounts of mathematical mistakes. The first one I
38:57
Speaker 1: saw it, I'm like, I must be wrong. This is
38:59
Speaker 1: Max Well, and then I realized, no, every paper is
39:03
Speaker 1: eighty pages long and has eighty mistakes in it.
39:06
Speaker 2: Like, oh no, it's good to know you can be
39:10
Speaker 2: famous and make tons of mistakes.
39:12
Speaker 1: And it's actually inspiring. But yeah, Maxwell had this amazing
39:17
Speaker 1: mind to take these crazy ideas from Faraday which no
39:22
Speaker 1: one had thought of things this way, and put it
39:25
Speaker 1: in math terms. And I have nothing but the utmost
39:30
Speaker 1: respect and love for Maxwell at also reading him can
39:35
Speaker 1: give you a stomach ache.
39:38
Speaker 2: So you said he made a lot of mistakes when
39:39
Speaker 2: he's being pointed out at the time, or did somebody
39:42
Speaker 2: eventually come through and smooth everything for him?
39:44
Speaker 1: So first he published this on Faaraday's Lines of Force,
39:47
Speaker 1: and I have to tell you this thing. He sent
39:49
Speaker 1: it to Faraday and then he had a meeting with
39:54
Speaker 1: Faraday where he explained it in simple terms, I mean,
39:57
Speaker 1: like wish that he had someone recording that. And Faraday
40:01
Speaker 1: said he did a really good job. He wrote Maxwell
40:04
Speaker 1: and he said, I really think every mathematical scientist should
40:08
Speaker 1: do what you did. But of course Maxwell didn't do
40:11
Speaker 1: it on paper. He only did it perfectly with Faraday.
40:16
Speaker 1: But you know, you come up with your ideas, you
40:18
Speaker 1: still have to explain it to others. And Veraday made
40:23
Speaker 1: an impassioned plea that every mathematical scientist should put their
40:29
Speaker 1: ideas out there so that other people can decipher the
40:34
Speaker 1: hieroglyphics and do experiments on it, use it to develop it.
40:39
Speaker 1: So he did that before Faraday died, and I'm still
40:42
Speaker 1: sad about that, even though he died as an older man.
40:46
Speaker 1: And then Maxwell, who was thirty years younger than Faraday,
40:50
Speaker 1: I think he read this article that people had done
40:55
Speaker 1: this experiment with an electric and magnetic component it that
41:01
Speaker 1: was equal to the speed of light, and he was like, oh,
41:07
Speaker 1: I'm going to go back to on Faraday's lines of force,
41:10
Speaker 1: and this time he called it on physical lines of
41:12
Speaker 1: force and write up the equations up to getting to
41:18
Speaker 1: an electromagnetic wave going at the speed of light in
41:23
Speaker 1: that material. And then he realized that that paper was
41:29
Speaker 1: full of mistakes and confusions and weird negative signs and
41:34
Speaker 1: and he didn't develop the electromagnetic wave very well. So
41:38
Speaker 1: he wrote another paper in eighteen sixty four, and this
41:40
Speaker 1: is his most famous paper, but that still had mistakes
41:44
Speaker 1: in it.
41:44
Speaker 2: Check your math, guys, check your math.
41:46
Speaker 3: Where there are your number two here? Like seriously, somebody
41:50
Speaker 3: fixing this stuff up?
41:51
Speaker 1: Well, no one could have reviewed this thing. I say
41:54
Speaker 1: it's a paper, but it was really three or four papers,
41:57
Speaker 1: Part one, Part two, Part three, Part one, Pit two four,
42:01
Speaker 1: and each one is like twenty pages thirty pages long,
42:05
Speaker 1: a really complicated math where Maxwell did weird things like
42:10
Speaker 1: if he had three directions for a field like electric field,
42:14
Speaker 1: he wouldn't call it e X, E Y, e Z,
42:17
Speaker 1: He'd call it alpha, beta, gamma.
42:19
Speaker 3: So they're all just independent variables, wow, just.
42:21
Speaker 1: All independent variables. And sometimes he'd only include one of
42:24
Speaker 1: those variables with the idea that we would know he
42:29
Speaker 1: met all three.
42:31
Speaker 3: So when I'm teaching electromagnetism. I give them these beautiful
42:35
Speaker 3: short equations that are symmetric th electricity and magnetism, and
42:39
Speaker 3: we call them Maxwell's equations. But Maxwell doesn't sound like
42:42
Speaker 3: he wrote them down in that way. So how do
42:45
Speaker 3: we get from Maxwell's like individual components and four pies
42:49
Speaker 3: and sign mistakes to the equations that we all know
42:52
Speaker 3: and love today.
42:53
Speaker 1: Well, he sort of did. If you pick and choose
42:58
Speaker 1: from his three and his book, you can get Maxwell's
43:04
Speaker 1: equations aside from a straight four pie, Maxwell didn't like
43:09
Speaker 1: four pie in the electric field for a charge, so
43:12
Speaker 1: he added four pies everywhere else, and he changed where
43:16
Speaker 1: he put these four pies.
43:18
Speaker 3: Sounds like a theorist, you know, Yeah, No, I mean I.
43:21
Speaker 1: Love Maxwell and also just like ah. But anyway, so
43:25
Speaker 1: when he published these things, people tried to understand it.
43:30
Speaker 1: There was various people because everyone knew Maxwell was brilliant,
43:33
Speaker 1: and they knew Fariday was brilliant, and they were trying
43:35
Speaker 1: to get it. So a lot of people wrote a
43:38
Speaker 1: paper or two about this, But the person who really
43:42
Speaker 1: dived into it was a guy named Oliver Heaviside who
43:47
Speaker 1: was working for his uncle named Charles Wheatstone the same
43:52
Speaker 1: guy chick it out on the talk.
43:54
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, small community.
43:56
Speaker 1: I gotta say Victorian English Science Society small anyway, Oliver
44:03
Speaker 1: Heaviside was working for his uncle. He had a high
44:05
Speaker 1: school education. He sees Maxwell's book because Maxwell wrote a
44:09
Speaker 1: five hundred page book and the library. He's like, Okay,
44:14
Speaker 1: this is the most brilliant thing I've ever seen. I'm
44:16
Speaker 1: going to quit my job. I'm going to teach myself math.
44:19
Speaker 1: I'm going to teach myself physics. I'm going to teach myself.
44:22
Speaker 1: I mean, he knew about basic physics for his engineering job,
44:26
Speaker 1: but advanced physics. I'm going to teach myself, advanced mathematics
44:31
Speaker 1: like quaternions. I'm going to teach myself all of this
44:34
Speaker 1: so I can figure it out. But like nine years
44:38
Speaker 1: in his parents' attic with the middle of the night,
44:43
Speaker 1: he only liked to work in the middle of night,
44:45
Speaker 1: supposedly all night, every night. And then he starts publishing
44:50
Speaker 1: an engineering magazine, and he publishes paper after paper after
44:55
Speaker 1: paper after paper after paper. And what made Oliver Heaviside
44:59
Speaker 1: easier was just simple things like Maxwell either used three
45:05
Speaker 1: letters or he used these weird swirly German letters that
45:09
Speaker 1: are really hard to distinguish an E from an F.
45:14
Speaker 1: And it's like you look at these equations and you're like, wait,
45:19
Speaker 1: what is this equation saying? It looks like it's saying
45:22
Speaker 1: E E E over, Like what does this say? And
45:27
Speaker 1: Oliver Heaviside did stuff like using capital letters in Roman
45:32
Speaker 1: letters and making them bold so you can read his stuff.
45:36
Speaker 1: It's a lot easier to read Oliver Heavicide, and he
45:40
Speaker 1: did other things. Maxwell had this idea of potentials, and
45:46
Speaker 1: Hevicide hated the potentials, he called them evil. But by
45:53
Speaker 1: trying to get rid of it, he got very close
45:55
Speaker 1: to getting Maxwell's equations. That's the simplest way to put it.
46:00
Speaker 1: I gave a whole talk at uc R Vinen with
46:02
Speaker 1: all the details about it, but like the short version
46:06
Speaker 1: of it is, he got clothes, and then after spending
46:10
Speaker 1: all that time studying it, all that time writing papers,
46:13
Speaker 1: he gets the owner of the magazine, the electrician quit
46:20
Speaker 1: and the new owner asked everyone. He said, I asked
46:24
Speaker 1: everyone who could possibly have wanted to read your paper,
46:28
Speaker 1: and I couldn't find a single person who read any
46:30
Speaker 1: of your papers, Wicked Burn. I'm just imagining how Heaviside
46:37
Speaker 1: must have felt he quit his job, spent ten years
46:41
Speaker 1: on this without knowing if it's going to be any good.
46:46
Speaker 1: He had publications and a couple of major publications, because
46:50
Speaker 1: it was much easier at that time to do that
46:53
Speaker 1: even if you weren't in academia. But he was told
46:57
Speaker 1: that no one was interested. Right, and then like months
47:02
Speaker 1: later it must have seemed like, oh, he hears the
47:06
Speaker 1: greatest news ever. Out of Germany, a guy named Heinrich
47:11
Speaker 1: Hertz had done an experiment. He used something called a
47:15
Speaker 1: rum Korf coil with these long sticks on it antenna,
47:20
Speaker 1: and he made a vibrating electric system. The vibrated slower
47:25
Speaker 1: than visible light. He had it emerged from one place
47:29
Speaker 1: and he received it in another place, and he found
47:32
Speaker 1: it moved at the speed of light. He discovered radio waves.
47:38
Speaker 1: And he said, the reason I did this was to
47:42
Speaker 1: validate the Maxwell Faraday equations. And in fact, his old
47:48
Speaker 1: boss had challenged him there was a contest you could
47:53
Speaker 1: get a hundred floor in or one hundred gold whatever
47:56
Speaker 1: if you could experimentally validate Maxwell's equations, and Hurtz said,
48:04
Speaker 1: this is too hard, I can't do it. And then
48:09
Speaker 1: years later when he did it. He sent it to
48:11
Speaker 1: his boss, Hemholtz, and he said, I'm sorry to bother you,
48:16
Speaker 1: but this is something you asked about years before. And
48:22
Speaker 1: he wrote back a postcard it just said Bravo, will
48:26
Speaker 1: publish it Wednesday. And the whole world went, oh my god,
48:34
Speaker 1: Maxwell's laws. We have to figure out Maxwell. So they
48:37
Speaker 1: picked up Maxwell's book and they said, oh my god,
48:40
Speaker 1: we have to find someone to figure out maxwells not us,
48:46
Speaker 1: and so Oliver Heaviside got a lot more popular because
48:51
Speaker 1: of that. Also, Hertz wrote one paper before his early
48:55
Speaker 1: death on the theory of Maxwell's equations, and one of
48:59
Speaker 1: the says of that was that he said in it,
49:03
Speaker 1: I think that Oliver Heaviside is working on a similar thing.
49:09
Speaker 1: So people started to read Heaviside as well. But if
49:11
Speaker 1: you look at like early Einstein papers, he calls the
49:15
Speaker 1: Maxwell Hurts equations. Like you said, these equations have so
49:21
Speaker 1: many names on them, so many names that can go
49:24
Speaker 1: to them. Honestly, if you're going to give two names,
49:27
Speaker 1: I think it should be Faraday Maxwell or Maxwell Faraday.
49:31
Speaker 3: Just cutting heavy side out, huh.
49:33
Speaker 1: I think he was incredibly influential. There's some people who
49:37
Speaker 1: have been very disappointed in and their influence, but not heavicide.
49:42
Speaker 1: What he managed to accomplish is astonishing. But he made
49:48
Speaker 1: the equations more readable, and if you can't make them
49:52
Speaker 1: more readable, you can't use them. But he didn't come
49:56
Speaker 1: up with the original idea or the original equations, or
50:00
Speaker 1: make the final formation.
50:02
Speaker 3: But physics takes a community, right, It's not just a
50:05
Speaker 3: couple of people. Everybody plays their role. It's amazing how
50:08
Speaker 3: many people had to be in the right place at
50:09
Speaker 3: the right time and be supported by or ditched by
50:12
Speaker 3: Charles Wheatstone in order for all this history to come
50:15
Speaker 3: together the way that it did.
50:17
Speaker 1: Or Faraday almost didn't get a job in science. It
50:20
Speaker 1: was just that Humphrey Davey had an assistant who got
50:24
Speaker 1: in a fight with a bottle washer who got in
50:27
Speaker 1: a fight with a delivery boy, and after the bottles
50:31
Speaker 1: got broken, Davy said, okay, Faraday, you can work for me.
50:35
Speaker 1: And so if there hadn't been that one altercation, I
50:40
Speaker 1: do not see how Faraday could have gotten a job
50:44
Speaker 1: in science. By then, he was working as a bookbinder,
50:48
Speaker 1: and he couldn't take days off, and he had no
50:51
Speaker 1: connections at all except the one person who knew him
50:56
Speaker 1: was Davy just a tiny bit, as he'd asked him
51:00
Speaker 1: for a job, and he'd showed him a book he'd written,
51:03
Speaker 1: and David's like, well, that's great, but I don't have
51:05
Speaker 1: an opening. So if that one fight hadn't happened, I
51:10
Speaker 1: don't see how Faraday would have gotten his job. I
51:13
Speaker 1: don't see how anyone else would have come up with
51:15
Speaker 1: the idea of electric fields. And if they hadn't come
51:18
Speaker 1: up with it later, it would have been too late
51:21
Speaker 1: for Maxwell. So would we have radio? Would we have
51:25
Speaker 1: equals MC squared? Would we have relativity? I mean, Faraday
51:30
Speaker 1: inspired the creation of the generator. Would we have generators? Probably,
51:36
Speaker 1: but it would have been later. I mean, I don't
51:38
Speaker 1: know where our life would have been if those two
51:41
Speaker 1: young boys hadn't gotten a fight.
51:45
Speaker 3: And you know, while the physics itself is mostly established,
51:48
Speaker 3: like classical electromagnetism, it's fascinating to me that the history
51:51
Speaker 3: of it is still being written and being rewritten and
51:54
Speaker 3: being revised. That part is still very alive. Do you
51:57
Speaker 3: think the story of Maxwell's equations is to change over
52:00
Speaker 3: the next one hundred years, or we're going to start
52:02
Speaker 3: telling more the story of Heavyside or more the story
52:05
Speaker 3: of fair Day or do you think that's sort of
52:07
Speaker 3: like become set in stone in our culture.
52:10
Speaker 1: I think we have separated the history from the science.
52:14
Speaker 1: I think that most of the people who talk about
52:17
Speaker 1: the history do not know the science. I mean, maybe
52:20
Speaker 1: they took a couple classes, and I'm just saying most.
52:25
Speaker 1: But when you teach the history to make an interesting
52:29
Speaker 1: story more than to teach the science, you miss out
52:36
Speaker 1: on the purpose of these people's lives. And when you
52:40
Speaker 1: teach the science without having any of the history, you
52:45
Speaker 1: miss out on what this stuff means and where we
52:49
Speaker 1: can go with it. And I did that. I mean
52:52
Speaker 1: I taught for many many years without the history because
52:55
Speaker 1: I didn't know it and I didn't know it was important.
53:00
Speaker 1: My hope is that I can show by example that
53:05
Speaker 1: this is not a little side project of like, oh,
53:08
Speaker 1: if we have an extra five minutes, maybe I'll tell
53:11
Speaker 1: you a little bit about the history. But don't worry.
53:13
Speaker 1: It's not on the quiz, it's not on the test.
53:14
Speaker 1: You don't have to pay any attention to be something
53:19
Speaker 1: like this is where our ideas came from. Yeah, and
53:23
Speaker 1: for me, that is a never ending source of inspiration
53:29
Speaker 1: and development because the more you learn, the more other
53:33
Speaker 1: people can learn from it, the more it can grow
53:37
Speaker 1: and develop. So I'm hoping that it's not stationary at all,
53:42
Speaker 1: that it is growing and developing and expanding.
53:49
Speaker 3: And it's worth digging into the history because there's lots
53:51
Speaker 3: of paths there that were dropped and not explored, and
53:54
Speaker 3: some of which could still be fruitful. You know, I
53:56
Speaker 3: read papers recently about the ether idea, which is coming
53:59
Speaker 3: back into fashion. So you never know what ideas are
54:02
Speaker 3: going to be tossed aside and then resuscitated. So yeah,
54:04
Speaker 3: knowing the history is absolutely crucial.
54:06
Speaker 1: There was also a scientist and now his name is
54:10
Speaker 1: escaping me, and in the early nineteen hundreds he decided
54:14
Speaker 1: to redo Faraday's last experiment, which did not work with
54:18
Speaker 1: modern equipment, and I used modern equipment because you know
54:21
Speaker 1: forty years later, right, and then he won the Nobel
54:25
Speaker 1: Prize for that work.
54:27
Speaker 2: WHOA.
54:29
Speaker 1: And I'm not making this up, he said in his
54:32
Speaker 1: Nobel Price speech. I went to Faraday's work and I
54:35
Speaker 1: thought this is an interesting experiment, not because I had
54:39
Speaker 1: anything negative to say about Faraday, just we had new
54:42
Speaker 1: equipment and I thought I would redo it. So yeah,
54:45
Speaker 1: there's gold in them Hills, and that feels like a
54:50
Speaker 1: perfect note to end on.
54:52
Speaker 2: That's a good reason to look back to the past.
54:54
Speaker 3: Yes, thanks very much Kathy for coming on and telling
54:56
Speaker 3: us the true history of electromagnetism.
54:58
Speaker 1: Thanks for having me. This was lots of fun.
55:01
Speaker 2: Thank you. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio.
55:12
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