Why is James Clerk Maxwell so dang awesome? How was he able to unify the forces of electricity and magnetism? Why was his work so revolutionary? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!
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this episode of Ask a Spaceman is brought to you by my friends at better help. Better help provides easy, convenient, affordable access to online counseling and therapy. And, you know, the therapy has been an important part of my, uh, life experience is something I'm absolutely not ashamed to talk about. I wish more people used therapists and counselors to take better care of their own mental health, just like they take of their physical health. Uh, I know a lot of you turn tune into this show for Astro Thera as a word, but maybe if you're having a really tough time, you should talk to an actual professional, and so I encourage you to go to better help. They are convenient and professional. It's real therapy and counseling, and it is affordable and you can connect online. You don't have to wait in a waiting room or any of that. You just talk to someone who who cares and and knows what they're talking about. As a listener, you'll get 10% off your first month by visiting better help at better help dot com slash spaceman, and I want you to join over 1 million people who have taken charge of their mental health again.
That's better help. HE LP dot com slash spaceman. When Einstein visited Cambridge in the 19 twenties, he was already super famous. This is after special relativity. This is after quantum mechanics was getting going. This is after general relativity. Einstein was the man. Someone came up to him and remarked, They said to him, You have done great things, but you stand on Newton's shoulders. Einstein replied with No, I stand on Maxwell's shoulders. We geek out over Einstein because he was a pretty smart dude and managed to make a couple of important contributions to our understanding in the natural world. But Einstein didn't geek out over himself, which some scientists managed to do. He geeked out over earlier scientists. And it's a shame that the number one person that he geeked out over to the level of having a portrait of this scientist in his office, which is the scientific equivalent of having a poster in your bedroom.
This person is largely unknown. In modern times. You've heard of my man crush. Or maybe it's a nerd crush. I'll I'll let you debate that on Maxwell before and Now you're going to hear about it a lot. Because if Einstein admires someone, then maybe, just maybe, we should pay attention. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you James Clark Maxwell. I need to get something about the pronunciation over and done with before we get too far. Apparently the the middle name it reads as Clark. But it could be pronounced as Clark. That's Scottish for you. We're just gonna go ahead and call him Maxwell, although my man JC is also acceptable, just not in public. Maxwell 18 31 to 18 79 Scottish described as socially awkward, and you get the sense from his pictures that he's hiding behind that formidable beard of his kind of a genius from the beginning, he got a mathematical proof published when he was 14. That's right, 14.
Meanwhile, when I was 14, I was just trying to beat the latest Zelda game. He's already a published author. One tutor called him slow, but I think that was mainly the tutor's fault. He came from a super rich family, had an estate in everything. By the time he was 25 he was already a professor. He eventually got laid off due to budget cuts. But it didn't matter because of the whole super rich thing, which gave him plenty of luxury. Time to sit around thinking deep thoughts and he thought a lot and he wrote a lot. I'm gonna focus on one contribution of Max Wells, which is electromagnetism. But there are other giant contributions that he made that if it weren't for the whole electromagnetism thing, he would still be famous for all these other things, like statistical mechanics. You, you, you guys, I should do a show on this. So I suppose Just ask the question. Have you ever heard of thermodynamics like like entropy and temperature and pressure and all that and and and I DO Gas law and all this stuff.
All that language was developed using steam engines and poking around with steam engines and seeing how valves work And what happens when we light stuff on fire and all that, all that good stuff. And we just developed that language and all those laws and relationships without really understanding what was going on at a fundamental level. What's going on at a fundamental level is something we call statistical mechanics. And Maxwell was one of the people who figured it out. So when your car is going, the fundamental physics behind what's happening in your car engine, we understand. Thanks to Maxwell, I did a whole episode about Saturn's rings and how Maxwell was enamored with them and decided it was like a competition like, uh, like explain Saturn's rings to anybody. And Maxwell was like, OK, and then he sat around for years, and then he, like, figured it out. He took the first ever color photograph by figuring out how to use different filters of taking black and white pictures through three different filters. And then you recombine it later.
We still use this. Today. Your color camera is really three different cameras with three different filters. We still use that basic technique that he figured out. So thank you, Maxwell. He also enjoyed writing poetry, which I will not read to you because while I frequently embarrass myself on the show, I don't think I have what it takes to recite Scottish poetry. I don't think you have what it takes to hear it, either. He was, by all accounts, of everybody who met him, a super genius of the highest order, plain and simple, just one of these people that appears on Planet Earth. And they're a super genius. He was simply able to think thoughts that nobody else thought. He was able to take clues that other people lay down and solve the puzzles. He was able to obtain insights that nobody else could see. In fact, in fact, while everyone agreed even in his lifetime, that he was wicked smart, he wrote such advanced level, he would just have a thought and a complete idea and write it down. But what he wrote down was so advanced that it usually took years for everyone else to catch up to him, that he would write something and everyone would recognize like, Oh wow, I.
I think Maxwell just figured it out, but I don't understand it. And then years later, other people would come in and and pick it apart and say, Yes, we all knew Maxwell was right and and here's what he meant that's how, like the the level that he was operating at, he was also an exceptionally talented mathematician, and when you can think at that level in mathematics, you become an unstoppable juggernaut of physics. In short, he was Einstein's Einstein. We look at Einstein today, and I've done episodes on Einstein. It's like a and and And you look at, Like, Newton. All these people are just how do they get these thoughts? And they're so casual about it, and they just, like, have these brand new ideas, their superhuman ability. Maxwell was one of these people. His greatest contribution to science, though, and his greatest contribution to humanity overall, is second only to his poetry was his investigations into the nature of electricity and magnetism and to set the scene.
You know, Maxwell is operating in this mid 19th century thing of science. This is just before Darwin's evolution. This is before germ theory. This is after this is 100 150 years after Newton. So we've got this whole gravity thing down, or at least kind of sort of. There's a revolution coming, but that's not till later. As before, quantum mechanics. This is the age, uh, the 18 hundreds, I would say is, is characterized by an evolution in our understanding of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics and electricity and magnetism, and we're making great strides in thermodynamics So like, we're really nailing this steam engine stuff, both in terms of building it and understanding it physically. And And we still use those kinds of physics today. But the electricity magnetism angle of the mid 18 hundreds. Well, I'm gonna take Maxwell's own words to describe the state of affairs.
In the mid 18 hundreds. These words he was actually applying to something else. He was actually applying it to statistical mechanics to thermodynamics because they were they were solving all these problems in thermodynamics. But there are some really, really strange stuff popping up that no one knew how to solve. Eventually the solution would be quantum mechanics, but that was a couple of generations away. So really, he was describing that. But I'm gonna take his own words and use it to describe the state of the art and electricity and magnetism. He said that the world was in a state of the thoroughly conscious ignorance that is the prelude to every real advance in knowledge. He was speaking of statistical mechanics. He knew that something funky was going on. He didn't know what the real advance in knowledge will turn out to be. Quantum mechanics but we can apply these exact same words to the state of lecture. Same magnetism. In the mid 18 hundreds, we basically had no idea what was going on. On one hand, we had electricity.
It was known to the ancients, like like everybody in human history has encountered electricity in some form. There are some animals that can shock you when you try to grab them like an electric eel, and that's painful and annoying. There's this thing called Lightning, which looks vaguely electrical, also just looks like a flash of light. We didn't know if it was electricity or not. It looked, just looked impressive. We could also come up with some crude ways to generate electricity. The Greeks realized that if you take amber and rub it, rub it, rub it really, really hard, you can you can give someone a shock, or you can get someone something to stick onto it. Now we call this phenomenon static electricity. They had no idea what was going on, and in fact, our word electron electricity comes from the Greek word for amber in the 18 hundreds. One of the hottest topics at the time was whether lightning really was made of electricity, and this was eventually demonstrated by Benjamin Franklin in his famous kite experiment because he was able to get lightning to strike a kite, run down a cord and then put electricity in a in a primitive battery.
And then he was able to use that battery to to electrically power something else. So that's that's pretty clear that lightning is made of electricity. That was pretty awesome. But people were also debating whether natural electricity was the same as artificial electricity. Like if if I touch an eel and it shocks me, or if I get struck by a lightning bolt, those are those kinds of electricity. Also, we were figuring out we're playing around with animals, and if you take like a dead frog and and and zap it and it and its legs twitch, OK, is that natural electricity? Is that artificial electricity? If I generate electricity by rubbing a bunch of stuff together? Is this different than the kind of stuff that appears in nature? These these are big questions. Many experiments in the 18 hundreds were beginning to show that there was indeed just one kind of electricity, but that it came in two flavors positive and negative. So that was a big insight, like you just think about this fundamental knowledge that that we teach like kindergartners about positive and negative electricity. And and 200 years ago that was a revolutionary insight.
By the 18 hundreds, we had realized that electricity that natural and artificial electricity were were the same thing. They could be generated and travel down a wire that electric energy could be stored, that a one electric thing could attract or repulse another electric thing. We knew that the strength of that attraction was related to the square of the distance between the objects not unlike gravity, which had just been discovered by Newton a couple of generations before. We just we just had this pile of facts about electricity, and we are starting to come to some sort of cohesive idea like, Oh, OK, uh, like charges repel. Or there's a thing called electric charge. We had to figure that out and that they can be positive or negative, and they can track or repel, and electricity can flow through certain things. Sometimes it's really hard for electricity to flow. Sometimes it's really easy for electricity to flow and that this difference in the ability for electricity to flow it, it can explain all sorts of different phenomena.
I'm like, OK, but what is electricity? What's going on? We didn't know. On the other hand, we had magnetism, which again has been known to humanity since forever, mostly through load stones, which are, you would imagine. Imagine you dig up a rock and it's like a magic rock. You can take little metal bits and it'll stick to the rock. That's weird. We call these load stones. If you had paper clips back then you know a a primitive form of paper clip. You could stick a paper clip on the rock. You'll just stick there like magic. We only figured out how these magic rocks worked 200 years ago. Think of the entire span of human history all the hundreds of thousands of years that anatomically modern humans have been on the earth, and we figured out what these magic rocks are. Less than 200 years ago, we had compass needles, which were super magic. Look, this magic rock. If I float it in water, it tells me where north is first I'm gonna define what North is.
But you get my point like it No matter where I turn it, turn it points in the same direction If you read a book or like Lord of the Rings, you know, you read in Lord of the Rings that that Frodo, uh, got a gift from the elves and it's a magical stone that always points in the same direction. You can use it to get out of the forest like you say, OK, magic, fun elves. Ha ha ha. No, that's a compass. That's just a compass. But we didn't figure out what compasses were and how they worked until less than 200 years ago. And it was thanks to Maxwell, we started to understand this concept of magnetism We started to play around. I see the early 18 hundreds and mid 18 hundreds as this era of just just horsing around with electricity and magnetism. We figured out that magnets also seem to attract and repel in one another also seem to have a positive and negative flavor, but we ended up calling them north and South. We could have called them anything, but we ended up calling them north and south, so electricity is positive and negative.
Magnetism has north and south strangely, with magnets. The two flavors always came paired together. You always had a north and south pole in the same magnet. Some magnets seemed permanent. Others could be made temporarily magnetic, and some things couldn't be magnetic at all. No one had any idea what was going on. Through the late 17 hundreds and the 18 hundreds, you had a whole bunch of rich Europeans playing around with electricity and magnetism and generally being confused. For example, the French physicist discovered that if you send electricity down to wires, the wires will attract or repel, depending on the direction of the electricity. That's weird. You got an English physicist, Michael Faraday. Oh man, one of the greatest experimentalists of all time. One of the greatest scientists of all time, one of the greatest physicists of all time had no mathematical training. Seriously, he understood trigonometry and maybe a little bit of algebra, and that was it. A typical modern day high school graduate has more math training than Michael Faraday, but he's a great experimentalist.
He discovered that if he he took a big metal loop like a a big horseshoe. Imagine that and he looped wire around one end and then another wire on the opposite side. So he got these two little winding of wire on opposite sides of the loop when he switched the electricity on and he didn't connect these wires at all. They're just sitting there minding their own business. He switch on the electricity in one wire. He would get a current of electricity in the other wire, even if they weren't touching. Can someone explain that? How did this electricity flow from one wire to another, even when they're not touching anybody? Anybody? He had no idea. Nobody he showed it to had any idea, either On pair. When he's playing around with these electric wires and and they they run in parallel and they repel and then they run in the opposite direction, they tell What? How do these electric wires talk to each other? Other experimentalists were finding all sorts of other weird stuff.
You could wiggle a magnet near a wire and get an electric. Current electric wires if you ran electricity through them, could deflect the direction of a compass needle. What is going on. People were starting to gel around this concept of electricity and starting to gel around this concept of magnetism. We're explaining charges and poles and attraction. But then how is electricity and magnetism related? How are they connected? Are they related? And that was the subject on everyone's mind. Because, of course, you have this experiment like if you start wiggling a magnet near a wire and you can get an electric current as if by magic, like is a magic wand, and you get this a little electric current coming out, nobody could figure out how or why. And so, like I said before, we had no idea what was going on. It was a mess. This is not the first time or the last time that physics has been in a big mess with a whole bunch of experiments that no one can explain. Today we have things like dark matter and dark energy, and we have all these experiments.
We have no idea what's going on we need in Maxwell, and here comes Maxwell. Into the mid 18 hundreds, Maxwell was working on other things, like color vision when he heard about all this ENM business electricity magnetism, business and Maxwell. Like I said, he's the kind of guy. He's the kind of super genius. He's playing five dimensional chess while everyone else is playing checkers. So he hears about this problem. All these related phenomena of electricity magnetism Are they related? Are they not related? And he just figures it out seriously, as far as we can tell. He just sat down one day he thought really, really hard, and he didn't stop thinking until he figured it all out. And then he published about it. He wrote three papers and a book about electricity and magnetism, and then he went on to work on other things like no big deal. He was so smooth about it. He didn't even break a sweat. He's like, Oh, what an interesting problem. Let me see here. Hm? OK, I got Here you go. See you later. Feel free to visit me in Scotland. That was it. That was it. That's all it is like decades.
A century of experimentation, investigation, mystery surrounding electricity and magnetism. You know, hundreds of thousands of years of humans playing with magnets and wondering about electric eels. And Maxwell just walks in and solves the whole thing. He was ahead of his time. It's like Maxwell was really a 21st century physicist who invented time travel and took all of our modern understanding and sophistication. Used it to help out all those 19th century thinkers. And that's why he had the beard, which was to disguise himself so he wouldn't. He couldn't recognize. He took all these experiments and thoughts and ideas and confusion and wrangle them. Last of them, control them. He wrote down a set of equations. Originally, it was 20 equations which a decade later were simplified to the four that are now familiar to us. Uh, these equations simply, you know, literally explained all of electricity and all of magnetism just done. It's true. All the experiments, all the data, all the results, all those crazy ideas that were popping out of labs around the world, a century of working on electricity and magnetism were summarized in a single paper by Maxwell.
People don't just do that, but Maxwell did. And as theories go, it's pretty straightforward. There's four equations. We've got some, um, modern names that we attach to these equations. Maxwell didn't name these equations like we do today. But think of all the you can. Can you tell I'm geek out here? Can you tell? Am I the only I realize I have enough self awareness to know that I'm geek out over this. Think of all that stuff, from rubbing amber to lightning to primitive batteries to load stones, compass needles, electric wires, wiggling magnets around all these experiments. Four equations describe all of it. All of it. One equation called We call Gauss's Law I. I haven't even gotten to Gaus, another genius of the time. That's another story. Feel free to ask. Gauss's law is simple. If you have an electric charge, it has something called an electric field. I'll talk more about that later.
This electric field points away from it if it's positive and towards it, if it's negative, if you draw a surface around the charge, the total amount of electric field punching through that surface is proportional to the amount of charge inside, so the strength of the electric field is proportional to the amount of charge. OK, then there's something called Gauss's magnetic law, which is there. There ain't no such thing as magnetic charges. It always comes in Paris, north and south. Yeah, Fair Days Law. A magnetic field that changes with time creates an electric field. You got Amber's law with Maxwell's edition, which is you can make a magnetic field by generating an electric current or by changing an electric field with time so either one of those will get you a magnetic field. Add to this a force law, which is, uh, charges respond to an electric field or a magnetic field. They get pushed and pulled by electric fields and they get twisted around by magnetic fields and you're done. You're done. He explained it all. All of magnetism, wiggling magnets, fair days, coils rubbing amber lightning, all of it. Those four equations.
And I know you're like Paul. How do those four equations explain? They explain it with maths because these are very, very simple statements. These are the core. These are laws, and from these four equations, you flush them out. I'm staring at a bookshelf that there's an entire book, a textbook devoted to fleshing out these four equations and finding all the little applications in all the low corners. That's the power of physics in general, which is one of the reasons I think physics is so cool. Look like four statements just summarized all of electricity and magnetism. Yes, there's all the whole photon quantum stuff, but that's later. OK, look at all the electricity and magnetism around you. You stick a magnet on the fridge, you flip a switch to turn on a light. You get out your binoculars to look at something far away. The sun feels hot. These four equations explain it all. 100% all of them. It just explains it. Maxwell did it right there. You have. In the early 18 sixties, Maxwell was like Welcome to the future. Seriously, Seriously.
Maxwell was a future thinker of physics. Maxwell was. It's it's It's like he got educated in the 21st century using our understanding of physics, and then went back in time. We owe so much to Maxwell. His way of thinking was so unique and so fundamental he applied it to electromagnetism. We ended up applying it to like everything. As an example of his future thinking, unification, unification, he realized that changing electric fields can create a magnetic field and changing magnetic fields, create an electric field So if you have an electric current going down a wire that creates a magnetic field around it, that is how far got his result? Because when he switched on the electricity in one of the little loops of wire that was a changing electric field that generated a magnetic field, that magnetic field was changing in generated an electric field generated a current in another wire boom, you can wiggle a magnet around.
That's a changing magnetic field that creates an electric field. His equation showed how all this worked. This was called and is still called the second great unification of physics. Newton was the first person to unify laws of physics. He realized that gravity on the earth was the same as gravity in space. That was a major step in unification. Maxwell figured out that electricity and magnetism are really two sides of the same coin as another example of future thinking. Besides his status as a super rich noble of Scotland, he also got support from Patreon That's patreon dot com slash PM Sutter. Using funds from his supporters, he was able to unify known physics. I mean, come on, that's the power of support That's the power of fan support. That is the power of patreon dot com slash PM Sutter as another example of future thinking. I've been tossing around this word like no big deal. Field field.
How many times in this show have I brought up the concept of the field? Like, Oh, yeah, you got a gravitational field, you got electric field, you got magnetic field, you got a Higgs field, you got a scalar field field field, field field. That's all of physics. All of modern day physics is field. Guess who invented it. The first clues of this idea of the field came from Faraday. He used iron filings around a magnet. And, you know, you can Sprinkle these iron filings around and you get this like, interesting like dumbbell shape around the magnets. He imagined this as lines of force. He thought, Oh, there's something here like this imaginary line of for magnetic force that is pushing on other other things. Maxwell took that one step further. He said, Oh, this isn't a mathematical trick. This isn't just a way to conveniently describe what's going on. Maxwell said that the electric and magnetic fields were real. That if there's an electric charge just sitting there, imagine a little little ball of electricity right there.
It creates a magnet, an electric field around it. The electric field permeates all of space, and it tells other charges how to move. So if I'm another charger and I'm walking by and I want to know, how am I gonna be affected by that charge over there? Well, all I have to do is measure my local field, and I say, OK, OK, the the electric field, that little charge over there. Well, it's pointing over here. OK, I'll go over here. The electric field tells me how to move. The magnetic field tells me how to move. That's not a mathematical trick, folks. That's not convenience of the equations. That's a physical object. Maxwell said that the electric and magnetic fields were the things that stored the energy needed to make electricity and magnetism work. We now understand the field to be the primary physical entity in physics. The field is more real than particles. The electric field we now realize in physics is more important, more fundamental on every way.
You can measure more real than the charge itself all of modern physics is based on studies of the field and that particles charges they arise from the field, not the other way around. Maxwell brought this little trick that Faraday had made, and I would love to do a show on Fair Day. Very fascinating person. But this little trick, he said. No, it's a real thing. Who does that? Who who invents physical objects of reality, who Maxwell does. That's who, he says. You know what electric and magnetic fields are? Real period. Get over it. Can you see why it took nearly a decade before people could come to terms with his genius? They knew he was right. From the moment he published, Everyone knew that he was correct, but they didn't like. They didn't want him to be right because it was so advanced. It's 21st century way of thinking brought into the mid 18 hundreds Unification fields, this unification idea.
He didn't just unify electricity and magnetism and put it under a single common thread. That's what we call it electromagnetism. He realized that electricity and magnetism are two sides of the same coin. He realized that yeah, electricity, magnetism, tomato, tomato, you can have an electrical wire moving towards a loop, or you can have a loop moving towards an electrical wire. Depending on your point of view, you can get electric fields, or you can get magnetic fields depending on on your point of view. Like what is an electric field? Well, it's it's just a different way of looking at a magnetic field. And if it if a changing electric field can make an in a magnetic field and a changing magnetic field can make an electric field, you can trade one for the other. It's just a matter of perspective. This would go on to be the foundation of all of our thinking and relativity, like, say, the equivalence of mass and energy, or time and space as two sides of the same coin. Yeah, it started here with Maxwell. I'm willing to bet that if Maxwell had lived, say, another decade or two, he would have invented relativity before Einstein did, because he was just that kind of thing.
We could have had special relativity in the late 18 hundreds. All the pieces were there. It just took another super genius to put them together. It took Einstein But Maxwell probably could have done it himself because he had already figured out he already realized like, Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. As an example of that of of how far he was able to get, he had a relatively short life. If he had lived another decade or two, he might have figured it out, because if uniting electricity and magnetism wasn't enough, he went on to discover something truly, absolutely earth shattering. He discovered something hidden in his equations that nobody not even Maxwell himself, was expecting. That's how advanced he was. And that's how powerful his equations were. He discovered something in the equations that he wasn't expecting. He was just busy unifying all of, you know, electricity and magnetism physics. And inside the equations, these equations were so dang powerful and so comprehensive, so universal. He discovered something else.
He invented light. He realized, Oh, if you have a changing electric field, you can make a magnetic field, and if you have a changing magnetic field, you can have an electric field, and these can, you know, play off of each other. I can change an electric field, and it makes, uh, evolving magnetic field. But then that evolving magnetic field makes its own electric field and that changing electric field makes another magnetic field and the magnetic field makes an electric field, and they can. They can swap places like back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And he wondered like OK, if if, like, space is made of something, you know, like the ocean is made of water, the atmosphere is made of air. You know the vacuum is made of something. We'll call it the ether. For now, this is where electric and magnetic fields live and operate is in this vacuum of space. He has wondered if that vacuum might be flexible. Flexible things carry waves.
He wondered if if if he could strike up an electric field, if that would generate a magnetic field and then make it an electric and a magnetic and electric, and they would just keep going on waving back and forth, back and forth and they might travel. And if they travel well, the speed would depend on the strength of electricity and the strength of magnetism, the the fundamental strength of these forces. And he was able to use his equations to figure out like OK, Sure. Like if I have these electric magnetic fields and they're waving back and forth and they're traveling, they travel at a certain speed. Oh, the speed. OK, we just need the strength of the electricity at, like, some fundamental level. OK, we get that from experiment at the strength of magnetic, uh, magnetic field. We get that from experiment I you plug this in and get the speed and get the wait. Hold on the speed of light. Maxwell himself said we can scarcely avoid the inference that light consists in the transverse undulations of the same medium, which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena.
Maxwell realized that light is made of waves of electricity and magnetism. He did it in his quest to unify electricity and magnetism. He discovered what light was made of light the light from your light bulb, the light from the sun, the light from the screen, the heat from the sun, radio waves, all of it. Electromagnetic radiation, waves of electricity and magnetism parallel in the 18 hundreds. Parallel to all this discussion of electricity and magnetism was a whole other branch of physics dealing with light and optics that also nobody understood. Maxwell solved that too. I'm surprised he didn't cure world hunger while he was at it. Maybe if he had another 10 more years relativity and then world hunger. He realized the importance of the speed of light as a fundamental constant. Here it was the ratio of electric and magnetic forces. Prior to that, people just thought, OK, the speed of light is we're doing experiments on this fun episode there the history of the exploration of the speed of light.
And it was just another number, like the speed of sound or the speed of a horse. The speed of light. No, He realized that there's something fundamental going on here. And as another example, he had another example of how he was a future thinker. This was the warm up act to modern physics that there are fundamental constants of the universe that are very, very important. He realized right away that his results with the speed of light contradicted Newton. Go back and listen to the episode on special relativity where I start there with that statement to develop special relativity. It was right here. Maxwell was the first person to say it. That's why I say if he had another 10 or 20 years, he would have figured out relativity. He was right there. He was right there also. Like There's also the fact, though, that he put this problem down and started working on other stuff. And And who knows if he would have been interested in this again? It's like, What? No, I already solved that. No, I'm gonna figure out the springs of Saturn. Now stop bothering me. His electromagnetic theory. Everyone knew it was right, but it was largely ignored because it wasn't entirely useful.
Like there were all these practical, like handyman level stuff that people had invented for electricity and magnetism. Uh, it, you know, just to get work done to do electric circuits and electric engines and things like that. He he was seen as too mathematical, not very useful. Even by Einstein's time. It was not widely taught, but it was. It was correct. In the story of electricity and magnetism is a great lesson. The progress of scientific knowledge is power to simplify and systematize understanding of natural phenomena. At the beginning of the 18 hundreds, we had a variety of random. Isn't this cool experiments? And at the end, we have a simple, complete theory. Thanks to Maxwell, I'll leave you with a few quotes. One is from Einstein quote. Imagine Maxwell's feelings when the differential equations he had formulated proved to him that electromagnetic fields spread in the form of polarized waves and at the speed of light to few men in the world has such an experience been vouch saved.
It took physicists some decades to grasp the full significance of Maxwell's discovery. So bold was the leap that his genius forced upon the conceptions of his fellow workers. Here's Richard Byman. From a long view of the history of the world seen from, say, 10,000 years from now, there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electromagnetism. The American Civil War will pale into provincial insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade. As for Maxwell himself, here's what he said, quote. What is done by what I call myself is I feel done by something greater than myself. I've been thinking how very gently I have always been dealt with. I never had a violent shove in all my life. The only desire which I can have, is like David to serve my own generation by the will of God and then fall asleep.
Thank you to Kevin Oh, Kevin M Roger and at KD a. Welch for the question that led to today's episode Thank you to my top patreon contributors. That's patreon dot com slash PM Sutter to keep the show going. My top contributors this month were Matthew K, Justin Z, Justin G, Kevin Duncan, MD Bar K Dude, Robert M, Nate H, Chris L, Cameron NAIA Aone, Tom B, Scott M Rob and Lowell T. It is everyone's contributions that keep this podcast going. I truly, truly do appreciate it. Keep those questions coming to hashtag. Ask the spaceman or ask the spaceman at gmail dot com. Go to the website. Ask us spaceman dot com to look up the show archives. Please leave a review on iTunes. I really do appreciate it, and I will see you next time for more complete knowledge of time and space. Thanks to Maxwell