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