Who really wrote Maxwell's equations?

Daniel and Kelly talk to Kathy Joseph about the true, twisted history of humanity's understanding of electromagnetism

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
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,

(00:28):
I must be wrong. This is Maxwell, And then I realized, no,
every paper is eighty pages long and has eighty mistakes
in it.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Like, oh no, it's good to know you could be
famous and make tons of mistakes.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
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

(01:06):
give you a stomach.

Speaker 3 (01:06):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:41):
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?

Speaker 3 (01:56):
Oh my god, somebody let him out.

Speaker 2 (01:59):
Hi.

Speaker 3 (02:00):
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I've been taught
the standard lore of physics history.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:14):
No.

Speaker 3 (02:14):
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

(02:36):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:49):
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?

Speaker 3 (02:57):
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

(03:20):
is a story bouncing around the halls of particle physics.

Speaker 2 (03:23):
Oh my gosh, how long ago was this?

Speaker 3 (03:25):
This apparently was in the seventies.

Speaker 1 (03:27):
Huh.

Speaker 2 (03:27):
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?

Speaker 3 (03:37):
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.

Speaker 2 (03:49):
But my urine story is true, right, not apocryphal.

Speaker 3 (03:54):
I can't fact check that myself, but it sounds right.

Speaker 1 (03:56):
Okay, all right?

Speaker 2 (03:57):
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?

Speaker 3 (04:13):
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

(04:34):
actually goes back and reads the original papers written by
these folks rather than just trusting the modern summaries.

Speaker 2 (04:41):
I love that about Kathy, and I love her sense
of humor. So let's jump in.

Speaker 3 (04:48):
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.

Speaker 1 (05:08):
Thanks for having me.

Speaker 3 (05:09):
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?

Speaker 1 (05:23):
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

(05:44):
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,

(06:08):
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?

(06:34):
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

(06:57):
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.

Speaker 3 (07:08):
Wow, thank you for your service. That's really the front
lines of education right there.

Speaker 1 (07:13):
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.

Speaker 2 (07:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (07:31):
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.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
Amen, How does writing pop science differ when you're writing
pop historical science.

Speaker 1 (07:47):
Is it a.

Speaker 2 (07:47):
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?

Speaker 1 (07:56):
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.

(08:20):
And it's a mystery story. Every single one of them
is a mystery story. Who did it? And why?

Speaker 3 (08:28):
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

(08:48):
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?

(09:11):
What were the experiments that were helping us figure it out? Well.

Speaker 1 (09:14):
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,

(09:39):
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.

(10:03):
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

(10:24):
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

(10:47):
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

(11:07):
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.

Speaker 3 (11:26):
Wow, we should start making two inch versions of modern textbooks.
That would be prettyhilarious.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
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.

Speaker 3 (11:37):
Physics is definitely not the way to be interesting at
a party. Yeah, it kind of it.

Speaker 2 (11:41):
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.

Speaker 1 (11:56):
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

(12:19):
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

(12:43):
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.

Speaker 2 (12:54):
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.

Speaker 1 (13:03):
Oh, it wouldn't hurt with their hands, but it would
sure hurt with your lips.

Speaker 2 (13:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (13:08):
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?

Speaker 1 (13:29):
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,

(13:52):
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

(14:15):
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

(14:41):
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

(15:02):
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.

Speaker 3 (15:19):
With shockingly high doses.

Speaker 1 (15:21):
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

(15:42):
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

(16:04):
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

(16:26):
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.

Speaker 3 (16:35):
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,

(17:02):
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.

Speaker 1 (17:23):
Oh, Michael Faraday is my favorite scientist of all time.

Speaker 2 (17:26):
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.

Speaker 1 (17:37):
Oh shoot, no.

Speaker 3 (17:41):
It's okay. You kind of have a new favorite every
ten minutes. Thoro all wonderful.

Speaker 1 (17:45):
Boat is one of my favorites. Okay, Michael Faraday is
clear and away my favorite.

Speaker 3 (17:51):
Right. Why is that because he was a fan of
the history as well.

Speaker 1 (17:55):
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

(18:21):
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

(18:41):
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,

(19:03):
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.

Speaker 3 (19:24):
One of the greatest physicists of all time, you're telling
me you had a math phobia.

Speaker 1 (19:28):
Terrible math phobia. He called it hieroglyphics. He never wrote
an equation. He didn't really understand them.

Speaker 3 (19:38):
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.

Speaker 1 (19:45):
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.

Speaker 3 (20:04):
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.

Speaker 1 (20:15):
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.

Speaker 3 (20:36):
No education except for his mom.

Speaker 1 (20:39):
Except for his mom.

Speaker 3 (20:40):
Big props to Faraday's mom.

Speaker 1 (20:42):
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

(21:03):
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

(21:24):
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

(21:45):
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.

Speaker 2 (21:59):
I mean, like, he's like Taylor Swift.

Speaker 1 (22:01):
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,

(22:22):
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.

Speaker 2 (22:34):
I didn't realize women were so important in Faraday's education.
You know what.

Speaker 1 (22:39):
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

(23:03):
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.

(23:24):
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,

(23:48):
he says stuff like I'm no poet, but if you
listen carefully, a poem will form in your mind.

Speaker 2 (23:57):
Oh nice, Yeah, that's great.

Speaker 1 (24:00):
I'm like, okay, I'm waving myself the vapors. So the vapors.
He loved physics as much as I love physics.

Speaker 3 (24:13):
And he actually did a bunch of experiments, right, He
like played around in the laboratory and made these discoveries himself. Right.

Speaker 1 (24:20):
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.

(24:41):
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.

Speaker 2 (24:58):
And had he figured that out or somebody else knew
that and he just knew it.

Speaker 1 (25:02):
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

(25:22):
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

(25:43):
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.

(26:03):
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

(26:24):
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.

Speaker 3 (26:32):
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?

Speaker 1 (26:42):
He understood it in terms of fields, because he was
the one to come up with the ideal fields.

Speaker 3 (26:49):
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.

Speaker 1 (26:58):
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.

(27:22):
In his book he says, the purpose of everything I
did was to get you to appreciate and understand Faraday's work.

Speaker 3 (27:32):
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.

Speaker 1 (27:44):
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

(28:07):
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.

Speaker 3 (28:22):
Wowdy did everything, basically, he did everything. I'm sure he
made his mom proud.

Speaker 1 (28:28):
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.

Speaker 2 (28:39):
That's nice though, It's nice that his mom gets to
be proud after doing all of that hard work to
train him.

Speaker 1 (28:44):
They were so adorable with each other.

Speaker 3 (28:46):
It's crazy, all right. So fair Day figures this all out,
and then he's at the Royal Society.

Speaker 1 (28:51):
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.

Speaker 3 (29:00):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 1 (29:01):
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

(29:23):
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,

(29:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (29:56):
Why what would you do with that information?

Speaker 1 (29:59):
So he could refer to pass paragraphs.

Speaker 3 (30:02):
As I said, in paragraphs forty two right right right.

Speaker 1 (30:05):
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.

Speaker 3 (30:19):
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.

Speaker 1 (30:26):
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.

Speaker 3 (30:38):
Yeah, so he.

Speaker 1 (30:38):
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

(31:02):
a vibration in those lines of force, and then vibrate
the other one.

Speaker 3 (31:08):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 1 (31:10):
He said, maybe, just maybe that's what light is. He said,
I'm trying to keep the vibrations and remove the ether.

Speaker 3 (31:20):
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.

Speaker 1 (31:31):
Yes. Wow.

Speaker 3 (31:32):
And he only revealed it because he gave an impromptu
talk at the Royal Society because wheat Stone ran out
the back.

Speaker 1 (31:38):
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

(31:59):
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,

(32:21):
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

(32:41):
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

(33:05):
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

(33:28):
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.

Speaker 2 (33:48):
I'm like, yes, he's speaking Faraday's lately.

Speaker 1 (33:52):
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.

Speaker 3 (34:09):
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.

Speaker 2 (34:25):
I think that's a great topic for us to tackle
after the break. All right, and we're back and.

Speaker 3 (34:46):
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.

Speaker 1 (35:05):
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,

(35:27):
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,

(35:47):
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

(36:08):
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

(36:31):
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,

(36:54):
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

(37:14):
of reality and messed together.

Speaker 2 (37:16):
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.

Speaker 1 (37:35):
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,

(38:00):
I know a hundred stories about how different people were
inspired in different ways. It's not to be repetitive inspiring.

Speaker 3 (38:07):
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?

Speaker 1 (38:19):
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

(38:43):
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

(39:03):
eighty pages long and has eighty mistakes in it.

Speaker 2 (39:06):
Like, oh no, it's good to know you can be
famous and make tons of mistakes.

Speaker 1 (39:12):
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

(39:35):
give you a stomach ache.

Speaker 2 (39:38):
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?

Speaker 1 (39:44):
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

(40:08):
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

(40:29):
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,

(40:50):
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

(41:12):
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

(41:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (41:44):
Check your math, guys, check your math.

Speaker 3 (41:46):
Where there are your number two here? Like seriously, somebody
fixing this stuff up?

Speaker 1 (41:51):
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,

(42:14):
he wouldn't call it e X, E Y, e Z,
He'd call it alpha, beta, gamma.

Speaker 3 (42:19):
So they're all just independent variables, wow, just.

Speaker 1 (42:21):
All independent variables. And sometimes he'd only include one of
those variables with the idea that we would know he
met all three.

Speaker 3 (42:31):
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

(42:52):
and love today.

Speaker 1 (42:53):
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

(43:16):
he put these four pies.

Speaker 3 (43:18):
Sounds like a theorist, you know, Yeah, No, I mean I.

Speaker 1 (43:21):
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

(43:42):
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.

Speaker 3 (43:54):
Oh my gosh, small community.

Speaker 1 (43:56):
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.

(44:19):
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,

(44:43):
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

(45:05):
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

(45:27):
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

(45:53):
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,

(46:13):
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

(46:37):
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

(47:02):
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

(47:25):
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

(47:48):
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

(48:09):
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,

(48:34):
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

(48:55):
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

(49:21):
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.

Speaker 3 (49:31):
Just cutting heavy side out, huh.

Speaker 1 (49:33):
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

(49:56):
up with the original idea or the original equations, or
make the final formation.

Speaker 3 (50:02):
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.

Speaker 1 (50:17):
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

(50:40):
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

(51:00):
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

(51:21):
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.

Speaker 3 (51:45):
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

(52:05):
of fair Day or do you think that's sort of
like become set in stone in our culture.

Speaker 1 (52:10):
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

(52:36):
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.

(53:00):
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

(53:23):
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.

Speaker 3 (53:49):
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.

Speaker 1 (54:06):
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.

Speaker 2 (54:27):
WHOA.

Speaker 1 (54:29):
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

(54:50):
perfect note to end on.

Speaker 2 (54:52):
That's a good reason to look back to the past.

Speaker 3 (54:54):
Yes, thanks very much Kathy for coming on and telling
us the true history of electromagnetism.

Speaker 1 (54:58):
Thanks for having me. This was lots of fun.

Speaker 2 (55:01):
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