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Fun with Physics

TUESDAY, 29 JANUARY 2013

BLOG ARCHIVE

2013 (3)

Faraday and the light!

Another incredible thing I discovered in these two weeks is that
the first to propose the light to be an electromagnetic wave was
Faraday and not Maxwell!
Faraday is well known for his concept of force line that brought to
the modern idea of field, and substituted the Newton idea of force
at distance.
Let me do a brute synthesis of the story.
When Faraday, yet unknown, started to play with electricity and
magnetism, there were a lot of experiments around, the last
one by Oersted linking electricity and magnetism, where a
current carrying wire was able to deviate (in a quite amazing
direction for the period) a compass needle. Faraday (almost)
closed the circle, showing with a memorable experiment that a
variable magnetic field was able to generate electricity: the
born of the electric engine! Thus, electricity and magnetism
were able to play each one with the other, somehow
exchanging their role.

January (3)
Faraday and the light! Another
incredible thing I...
Et si le temps n'existait pas? Un peu
de science s...
Why a blog? Because I'm curious and
would like to ...

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Then arrived Maxwell, a young genial mathematician, that joined mathematically all
these experiment on electricity and magnetism, discovered that the emerging system
was not coherent, and invented a new ingredient (the drift current). That's all! Now his
theory predicts the existence of a wave composed by a smart combination of electric
and magnetic forces and traveling with a speed of 300 000 km/s. The speed of light
was recently measured and the value was exactly that! At this point we, physicist, like to
joke and let Maxwell pronounce: "Fiat lux, and lux facta fuit".

What is really impressive, is

that Faraday, in the absence
of the Maxwell formalism,
and with an uncomplete
experimental framework (as
later demonstrated by
Maxwell), was able to
hypothesize that the light
was an electromagnetic
field! This is pure genius, no any math, no any logic can
interpret this intellectual leap.
A possible, very weak, basis for Faraday idea seems to be a quite complex experiment
he made on the effect of magnetism on light polarization.
Posted by Enrico Pieroni at 04:38

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Et si le temps n'existait pas? Un peu de science subversive by Carlo Rovelli.

Due to a prolonged flue I had the nice "opportunity" to stay two weeks at home in the
first half of January, thus I made some readings that deviates from the usual home and
work back and forth routine.

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Fun with Physics

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Rovelli, twenty years ago, was one of the founders of a

particular approach to unify Einstein general relativity and
quantum mechanics. For me the booklet is quite intriguing for
the rediscovery of the different conceptions of time and
space, and in particular to realize we are often driven by a
priori conceptual models of which we ignore the force or,
worst, we are not even conscious.
Roughly speaking, in Newton age there was a debate on the
nature of space and time. Newton made his proposal, of
whose limits was himself well aware, and given the incredibly strong explicative and
predictive power of his machinery, his ideas dominated human minds for more than
three centuries. Newton equations and Newton gravitation law required a fixed spatial
background, a kind of box containing all the objects, with an existence in itself, over or
better inside which all the events unroll.
Pascal and Leibnitz, each one with some differences,
thought that the space do not exists in itself, but it is
just the set of relations between the objects. For them,
the absolute space cannot exist: of a single object we
cannot say if it is moving or at rest, it is meaningless
the question itslef given the absence of any reference.

About the time, from an operational point of view, what

an experimenter do is to take a physical phenomenon
as a reference and compare the phenomenon under
study to it. She will use for instance the small
pendulum oscillations (as Galileo) or refer to more
modern things as the emission or absorption of
photons between two specific energetic level of a
given atom ("atomic" watches) ... but the essence will
be always the same. She also need to set up a well
defined system to make the comparison, given that to
define simultaneity of events not spatially co-localized will
require some sync work, that is (not immediate but) feasible.
Thus, as Newton observed, there's no way to evaluate the
absolute time, nevertheless its introduction will far simplify
the equations and forced him to use it. What is the
simplification? Suppose, for instance, to have five physical
measurable things A, B, C, D, E ... (energy, position, velocity,
...). If you can assign to each of them a running label t (as
time) you end up with just five temporal functions A(t), B(t),
C(t), D(t), E(t). That's all. Otherwise you are forced to make
all the comparison of each one to the other, that is A as a function of B, C, D. E, B as a
function of C, D, E, ... and so on ... that is twenty-four functions!
Newton ideas had a well-deserved place in our scientific development, he was one the
"Great", and his game worked very very well, partly even after Einstein, at least up to
now :-).
Posted by Enrico Pieroni at 04:03

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Why a blog? Because I'm curious and would like to share some ideas, readings,
pictures, puzzles, questions (many) and answers (really a few) with curious
people. About what? Mainly about science, but not Physics exclusively, ... a lot of
Biophysics, Biology and Immunology too will be around, and Math of course. I hope
writing will help me to focus the ideas too and the -more than welcome- discussions will
improve knowledge for everybody. Physics studies shaped my mind and provided me
many instruments to be critic and make sense of what is out there, that is why I entitled

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Fun with Physics

http://funphys.blogspot.it/

this way the blog, but it could be better thought as ... a Bazaar, yes I like it ... it will be a

Posted by Enrico Pieroni at 03:06

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