[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: It’s Feynman again. ““From a long view of the history of mankind, seen from, say, ten thousand years from now, there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell’s discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil War will pale in provincial’s insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event at the same decade.”
Rick Rosner: I missed some of that but he’s saying that the biggest deal was Maxwell’s Laws of electromagnetism. So I’m about to be found out here because I never got through a class where I learned to deal with those laws, where those laws were thoroughly explained to me. I know some shit about them. I know that a light propagates as a wave where it’s tugged forward by a magnetic field that is itself tugged forward by some other electrical field so that they pull themselves forward at the speed of light but I never had a course in Maxwell’s Laws. So I’m not qualified to comment on them except they are important and it’s really a just bad form for me to not be more conversant in them. Anything else I say would be just kind of half-assed winging it, so let me not do that…
I can tell you one thing that he develops his laws and one implication of the laws is that there’s a wave that can propagate electromagnetically and I don’t know how long it took them to figure it out but he was like “Whoa! that’s fucking light” so I think I’m not sure he was looking to describe light mathematically, I think he was coming up with the rules of physics and light came out of the rules.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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Rick Rosner 