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

Episode Date: December 26, 2024

Daniel and Kelly talk to Kathy Joseph about the true, twisted history of humanity's understanding of electromagnetismSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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. First, when I thought, I'm like, I must be wrong. This is Maxwell. And then I realized, no, every paper is 80 pages long and has 80 mistakes in it. Like, oh no. It's good to know you can be famous and make tons of mistakes. Exactly. It is 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 stomachache. 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. Wintersmith, 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 there are 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, though 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. And 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 70s. Huh. So my favorite urine-based physics story? Is it Hennegg 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 3D printed trophy for Baughfest 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 Loves Physics. Check it out. She also was a high school physics teacher 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 Ph.D. 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've always been suspicious of everything I read is like, is that historically true or not? Because I did that. And then I ended up through my various past 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 on how to test if different devices are okay or different items

are okay. Like, is there a weakness in the line of train 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 bad poetry. There's crazy, crazy things.

And I started to just look into the history every once in a while just for my own notification. And then I ended up being a high school physics teacher, which I love. 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's 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 science.

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 taught me nothing 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 1700s, 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 Sun 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 drawout 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 fluff or 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 1749 that 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. They were so 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 pretty hilarious. Well, it sounds like a little cheat sheet for, like, how to be interesting at a party. Exactly. 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 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 expect. considering how dangerous it was. But I think that's because the time was so dangerous. They don't have antibiotics. You could die a 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 Mathia Boza, 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 while someone rubbed that sphere

and then give her a kiss and he called it Venus Electrophicatus 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 it. That's a great kiss. And it was the idea that he wanted to create

a spark so that they would both be like, ooh, no, fun. But it hurt. Woo. 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 less electricity is. At what point did people start to wonder like, can we understand this to do experiments to try to, you know, 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 Duffet, 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 today. And he didn't experiment like that, and he had two charged rods. And he's like, okay, if it repels from one, it should 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 out 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 Sistinay-de-Vay 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 either 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 doses.

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 on to 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 developments 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. Right. 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. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace.

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And, you know, we're always going to keep you up to speed on all the news and happenings around the women's sports world as well. So make sure you listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. 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 at all time.

I think that's the second time you've said that, isn't it? Is 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 can have a new favorite every 10 minutes.

They're all wonderful. Boza is one of my favorites. Okay. Michael Faraday is clear and away my favorite. Why is that? Because he was a fan of the history as well? Partially. You asked me to talk about Michael Faraday, but I'm going to first start saying, I didn't start off by thinking the history of science was that 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 equation. It comes from how we got the equation. And no one has been more influential and more poetic than Michael Faird. 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. with because he called his brother Robert instead of Robert.

And the brother 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

physicist of all time you're telling me he 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's 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 or 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 was always hanging out at a booksellers just to look at the books in their window. And the bookseller, this guy named Rabel, 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 is this guy named Humphrey Davy, who was a famous chemist, like the world's famous chemist, who is doing experiments with this giant battery to separate chemicals and discovered a whole bunch of different chemicals. This was 1800 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. 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 50 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 poet coolridge 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 Marcette,

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? And 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 is a different time period.

So you find people who would affect, you know, sexism and racism, 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, wow. That is nice. Yeah, that's great. I'm like, okay, I'm waving myself. Oh, no, Faraday. Oh, the vapors. So the papers. 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 on July 4th, 1831, 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 coiled 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 Orsted 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 didn't experiment. And he found current could move magnet in a circle and a magnet could move a current 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 the physics laws at the time. And then in 1831, he found out that you could use magnetism to make electricity, because he actually had two coils on an iron ring. He's like, maybe the iron rules move 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 idea of fields. Because when I was taught the history of physics, usually Maxwell is given the credit for that. Maxwell is the one who thinks about things in terms of fields for the first time. But you're saying it's Faraday. It's 100% Faraday. And Maxwell even wrote his first paper called On Fairday.

Faraday's lines of force in Maxwell's famous 1864 paper where he describes how light is an electromagnetic wave. He says, this is exactly like Faraday said in 1846. 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 in popular. the rising. 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 fields. He created the idea of electric fields. He found out that a magnetic field could change the polarization of light. So he found a connection between electricity, magnetism, and light. He found that everything had a magnetic effect. He coined the term magnetic field. Faraday did all this. This is all Faraday, okay.

All Faraday. And created the idea of electric fields and dielectrics and every other term you use in chemistry, like cathode, anode, electrode, all came from Farad. Wow, Faraday 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. I'm like, we don't need anymore. Aw, 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 Faraday figures this all out, and then he's at the Royal Society. He's at the Royal Society. This is 1846, May of 1846, and he's supposed to introduce a talk by a guy named Charles Wheatstone. 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 the speech stopped. I've been told that they now lock the back door at the Royal Society because they still have talks there. And I'm like, 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 bailed.

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, 30 or so years. Wow. And from number one to number, like, I don't know, 20,000 or something. Wow. Why?

What would you do with that information? So he could refer to past paragraphs. Oh, right. As I said in paragraph 7,442. Right, right, right, right, right, right. Exactly. And that's what he'd do with his papers, too. All his papers on 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 to talk for an hour, and he never was unprepared.

He studied how to talk. He was always very, very well prepared, but he wasn't. 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 we'll vibrate the other one. 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 Faraday, Magnusism, Faraday has the idea of fields. Faraday figured out dipoles and dielectrics. Faraday even came up with the idea that light is. is a vibration of electromagnetic fields.

Yes. Wow. And he only revealed it because he gave an impromptu talk at the Royal Society because Wheatstone 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 to it. 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.

The weird thing is, in 1837, 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. Why? Well, two reasons.

One is because he thought of, so imagine two magnets, and you're pushing the two Norse together. You could 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 way 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 matter.

mathematical science that they had at the time. So there was lots of letters of like, I really respect you, Mr. Faraday, Professor Faraday, whatever, and let me tell you the 12 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 language. You're like, this is showing my love for you. I follow you. just don't believe this. And the other part is that Faraday thought that dielectrics, non-conductors propelled the electric field forward instead of reduce the electric field. All right. So draw a 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. Hola, it's Honey German, and my podcast, Grasasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in, like, over 25 years.

Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk, right? Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. I feel like this is my destiny. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs,

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Listen to the new season of Grasas Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness, the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life. impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro.

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All right, and we're back. And we're talking to Kathy Joseph, famous YouTuber of Kathy Loves Physics fame, who's telling us all about the history of Maxwell's equations. So when we broke off, Faraday had revealed all the big insights about how electromagnetism works. And you were 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 they're amazing ideas. But in order to use it to predict other things, we need the math.

And Maxwell added that secret sauce to math. And also, because of Maxwell, we have vector mathematics. But anyway, let me start with what Maxwell's 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 21 or 22 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 Ampier and Poissau and all these other people who are much more mathematical? Ampire 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, 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. It inspired me to do this, to see how Faraday's view of reality worked with all these equations with these other views of reality and meshed 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 to have to remember four 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 I know 100 stories about how. 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's sort of a mathematical person, and Faraday is more of a poet of physics. Does Maxwell like what he reads?

Does it make sense to him? Is he struggle with it? He's immediately in thrill. 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 got to 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. At first when I thought, I'm like, I must be wrong. This is Maxwell. And then I realized, no, every paper is 80 pages long and has 80 mistakes in it. Oh, no.

It's good to know you can be famous and make tons of mistakes. Exactly. It is 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 stomachache. So you said he made a lot of mistakes. Were he being pointed out at the time or did somebody eventually come through and smooth everything for him? So first he published this on Faraday'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, I wish I 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 properly with Faraday. But, you know, you come up with your ideas. You still have to explain it to others. And Faraday 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 30 years younger than Faraday, I think, he read this article that people had done this experiment with an electric and magnetic component 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 he didn't develop the electromagnetic wave very well. So he wrote another paper in 1864, and this is his most famous paper, but that still had mistakes in it. Check your math, guys.

Check your math. We're the reviewer number two here. Like, seriously, somebody's going to be fixing this stuff up for him. 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, part two, three, four. And each one is like 20 pages, 30 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 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 between 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 did 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 papers and his book, you can get Maxwell's equations aside from a stray 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. But 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 Faraday 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 Heveside, who was working for his uncle named Charles Wheatstone, the same guy who had chicken. out on the talk. Oh, my gosh. Small community.

I got to say, Victorian English Science Society was small. Anyway, Oliver Hepaside was working for his uncle. He had a high school education. He sees Maxwell's book

because Maxwell wrote a 500-page book and a 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, 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 up. Spent 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 Haviside 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 is this saying? And Oliver Heveside 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 Hevisi. And he did other things. Maxwell had this idea of potentials and Heverside hated the potentials. 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 Irvine with all the details

about it, but like the short version of it is he got close. And then after spending all that time studying it, all that time writing papers, he gets the owner of the magazine, the 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. Oh, no, that's devastating. Wicked burn.

I'm just imagining how Heavicide must have felt. He quit his job, spent 10 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, uh-huh, he hears the greatest news ever. Out of Germany, a guy named Heinrich Hertz had done an experiment. it. He used something called a Rumkorf coil with these long sticks on it, antenna, and he made a vibrating electric system that vibrated slower than visible light. He had it emerge 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 100 florin or 100 gold, whatever, if you could experimentally validate Maxwell's equations. And Hertz said, this is too hard.

I can't do it. And then years later, when he did it, he sent it to his boss. Holtz. 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, we'll 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 Maxwell. 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 influences 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 Hertz equation. 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 Heaviside out, huh? I think he was incredibly influential.

There are some people who I've been very disappointed in and their influence, but not Heaviside. What he managed to accomplish is astonishing, but he made the equations more readable. And if you can't make the 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 Huffrey Davy had an assistant who got in a fight with a bottle washer, who got in a fight with a delivery boy. And after 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 size. 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 because he'd asked him for a job and he'd showed him a book he'd written. And Davey'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 going to change over the next 100 years? Or we're going to start telling more of the story of Heaviside or more of the story of Faraday? 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 glasses. 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. 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 1900s,

he decided to redo Faraday's last experiment, which did not work with modern equipment. And I used modern equipment because, you know, 40 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 Prize 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. Thank you.

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