FROM SCRATCH SERIES || CHAPTER 2: विद्युत्वृत्त(The electric Chronicles) || Part 3: Electromagnetism and the great synthesis: The Maxwell Equations

 Part 3 || Electromagnetism and the great synthesis: The Maxwell Equations ||

Next the world saw, the dawn of something called: Electromagnetism. The man who bore the next torch, then, was one with little to no schooling, and no math beyond arithmetic. This man reached to true greatness by teaching himself and propelled to the heights of, not only, intellectual greatness but also spiritual one- He refused knighthood and turned down the presidency of the Royal Society. The man is: Michael Faraday(1791 - 1867). 

Michael Faraday

Faraday's primary contributions start from one: Electromagnetic Induction in 1831. Faraday discovered that: A changing magnetic field(a concept he introduced) induces an electric current in a conductor. He discovered it through his experiments involving two metal coils wrapped around an iron ring -> and the observation that a current is generated in the second coil whenever a current was started or stopped in the first. In essence: 

He was also the first person to introduce the concept of force fields, or lines of force(Or lines of Virtue). He drew lines of force and introduced a concept of force fields for forces acting at a distance. And then, the world of science saw a conclusive moment in this trail of electricity with a great synthesizer that come along and formulated and unified all of the previous ideas into just four mathematical equations. Yes, we're talking about the one, and only: James Clerk Maxwell(1831 - 1879). 

      James Clerk Maxwell

He was a Scottish physicist and mathematician who was the first person to unify electricity, magnetism, and even light as "manifestations of the same phenomena". Maxwell unified all known electrical and magnetic phenomena into a single Theory: Electromagnetism. He churned out four equations and even provided a correction term for Ampere's circuital law. Here are his equations picked up from NCERT: 

This led to an obvious conception: So an accelerating charged particle can create a magnetic field(due to changing electric field) -> Changing magnetic field -> which would in turn create a changing electric field -> and so on... So -> an oscillating charged particle should be able to create something of a wave-> An Electromagnetic Wave that is. And this opened up a whole new world of Wireless technology with Heinrich Hertz later experimentally confirming Maxwell's theories. A property of oscillation of these charged particles is frequency-> and we can have a whole range of frequencies-> which led to the birth of the Electromagnetic Spectrum, which even light is a part of. Here's an NCERT illustration of this spectrum: 

With this, and later on with the discovery of the fundamental particle of nature: the electron, by Mr. JJ Thompson, with the usage of an improvised version of the Geissler tubes: The Cathode Ray Tubes, this chapter ends, but a whole new world- the world we live in now- finds its beginning. This is the world of complex computation: The electronic world....

Here are some great YouTube resources to explore the history of computation and electricity: 

1. An elaborate history of electricity presented in a dramatic movie up until vacuum tubes and superconductors

2. A nice illustrative video showcasing the evolution of modern computation devices like the triodes and beyond up until the eniac computer

3. A film mostly focused on the history of programming and coding

Also, from now on, we're not gonna have chapters for this series but episodes... detailing different topics of interest as they show up... peace till then ✌️✌️...