Introduction In this video I am going to explain the dot product, the cross product, the divergence, the curl and how it all works for Maxwell’s equations AND what Maxwell’s equations mean about magnets and light and a tiny bit about why that is important. But before I do that, I want to take a …
Maxwell’s Equations Explained: Supplement to the History of Maxwell’s Equation Read More »
How was the first radio wave discovered and why? Well, it all had to do with a pessimistic young German scientist named Heinrich Hertz and a contest that he was too intimidated to try.This is one of the most influential experiments of all time. Table of Contents Hermann von Helmholtz Hertz’s Early Life How Hert’z …
How Heinrich Hertz Discovered Radio Waves to Validate Maxwell’s Equation Read More »
A scientist named Joseph Henry and a machinist/inventor named Alfred Vail invented the telegraph that transformed the world. Samuel Morse put their ideas together and gained the fame and the profit. Morse didn’t do it for money, however. His inspirations were a strange brew of ego, tragedy and xenophobia. How could ego, tragedy and xenophobia …
History of the Telegraph: How Samuel Morse Stole It & Became Famous Read More »
Niel Bohr said that before 1913 no one expected that the lines of color you get from burning hydrogen would tell you anything about physics even though the colors follow a pattern. Just like butterflies have patterns with the colors on their wings, “but nobody thought that one could get the basis of biology from …
Niel Bohr’s Nuclear Model: The Nuclear Model That Changed Physics Read More »
If you search online for how the nucleus was discovered you will probably find a description of Rutherford’s gold foil experiment, where a beam of alpha particles hit a piece of gold and then the position of the alpha particle is found on a screen that is wrapped around the gold. Now, an experiment like …
Discover alpha and beta radiation, Radon, and the nucleus! In 1909, a quirky and engaging New Zealander named Ernest Rutherford gave his co-worker’s new assistant some busywork to get him used to the equipment. Rutherford wasn’t expecting to find any results. Instead, the assistant found something startling. Rutherford decided that the only way these results …
I remember when I learned about the second law of thermodynamics: that the total entropy of a closed system can only increase where entropy is a measure of the disorder of a system. When I learned this I remember thinking: why did anyone make an equation to describe disorder? How did they make an equation …
In 1865, James Clerk Maxwell wrote his famous (or infamously difficult) Maxwells equations. These equations were to transform our world. For example, when Einstein was asked if he stood on the shoulders of Newton, he replied, “No, on the shoulders of Maxwell”. But who was James Maxwell, why are his equations important and why did …
Did spectroscopy, the study of how light is emitted and absorbed by heated objects, really revolutionize the sciences and fundamentally shift our understanding of the world? In short… yes! In Chemistry, spectroscopy quickly caused the identification of new elements and infrared spectroscopy is still used in chemical analysis to this very day. In Astronomy, spectroscopy …
X-ray was the first scientific discovery that wasn’t made famous through scientific publishing. In fact, despite the fact that Roentgen wrote a startlingly prophetic and accurate paper about the discovery of this new ray in December of 1895, most scientists learned about it through their morning papers! Therefore, the discovery of the x-ray should really …
