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posted by janrinok on Saturday March 28 2020, @06:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the summing-up dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

We are unabashed fans of [The History Guy’s] YouTube channel, although his history videos aren’t always about technology, and even when they are, they don’t always dig into the depths that we’d like to see. That’s understandable since the channel is a general interest channel. However, for this piece on James Clerk Maxwell, he brought in [Arvin Ash] to handle the science side. While [The History Guy] talked about Maxwell’s life and contributions, [Arvin] has a complimentary video covering the math behind the equations. [...]

Deriving Maxwell’s equations is a math nightmare, but [Arvin] doesn’t do that. He uses some amazing graphics to explain how the equations relate electricity and magnetism. A great deal of our modern world — especially related to any sort of radio technology — builds on these four concise equations.

One thing we didn’t realize is how wide-ranging Maxwell’s interest were. He contributed to astronomy by explaining Saturn’s rings, derived statistical laws about gasses, and worked on color vision, including creating the first light-fast color photograph. He also contributed to thermodynamics, control theory, and optics. Those were the days!


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2020, @05:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2020, @05:52PM (#976687)
    My understanding is that Heaviside simplified Maxwell's equations. This made them usable to less capable mathematicians, but something might have been lost:

    "Heaviside worked to eliminate the potentials (electric potential and magnetic potential) that Maxwell had used as the central concepts in his equations; this effort was somewhat controversial, though it was understood by 1884 that the potentials must propagate at the speed of light like the fields, unlike the concept of instantaneous action-at-a-distance like the then conception of gravitational potential." -- The term Maxwell's equations [wikipedia.org]

    Nikola Tesla promised us that one day our machinery would be powered by the very wheelwork of nature [abc.net.au], which I interpret as meaning that Tesla grokked Maxwell's original equations, and recognized the mistake in Heaviside's restatements.