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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!


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2020, @06:01PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2020, @06:01PM (#976689)

    You can have one of these,
        http://massmind.org/images/com/visi/www/http/~darus/hilsch/hilsch.html [massmind.org]

    ...
    After a serious analysis of the consequences of his law, Maxwell permitted himself a touch of humor. He suggested that there was a statistical probability that; at some time in the future, all the molecules in a box of gas or a glass of hot water might be moving in the same direction. This would cause the water to rise out of the glass. Next Maxwell suggested that a system of drawing both hot and cold water out of a single pipe might be devised if we could capture a small demon and train him to open and close a tiny valve. The demon would open the valve only when a fast molecule approached it, and close the valve against slow molecules. The water coming out of the valve would thus be hot. To produce a stream of cold water the demon would open the valve only for slow molecules.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2020, @06:03PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2020, @06:03PM (#976690)

    and the rest of the pull quote,

    Maxwell's demon would circumvent the law of thermodynamics which says in essence: "You can't get something for nothing." That is to say, one cannot separate cold water from hot without doing work. Thus when physicists heard that the Germans had developed a device which could achieve low temperatures by utilizing Maxwell's demon, they were intrigued, though obviously skeptical. One physicist investigated the matter at first hand for the U. S. Navy. He discovered that the device was most ingenious, though not quite as miraculous as had been rumored.

    It consists of a T-shaped assembly of pipe joined by a novel fitting, as depicted in Figure 234. when compressed air is admitted to the "leg" of the T, hot air comes out of one arm of the T and cold air out of the other arm! Obviously, however, work must be done to compress the air.

    The origin of the device is obscure. The principle is said to have been discovered by a Frenchman who left some early experimental models in the path of the German Army when France was occupied. These were turned over to a German physicist named Rudolf Hilsch, who was working on low temperature refrigerating devices for the German war effort. Hilsch made some improvements on the Frenchman's design, but found that it was no more efficient than conventional methods of refrigeration in achieving fairly low temperatures. Subsequently the device became known as the Hilsch tube.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2020, @07:41PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2020, @07:41PM (#976731)

      I had a colleague in grad school doing research in Hilsch tubes. They are loud as hell as you have high pressure gas blowing through a tube.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 29 2020, @02:55AM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday March 29 2020, @02:55AM (#976811) Journal
      The Hilsch tube is an intriguing machine - no moving parts and able to generate a substantial temperature difference. It also can be used for separation [wikipedia.org] of different density gases (the less dense components tend to go out the cold end), used for example, to separate uranium hexafluoride by uranium isotope.