FORCE FIELDS ;
died in 1829 Faraday was free to make a series of stunning breakthroughs that led to the creation of generators that would energize entire cities and change the course of world civilization.
The key to Faraday's greatest discoveries was his "force fields." If
one places iron filings over a magnet, one finds that the iron filings
create a spiderweb-like pattern that fills up all of space. These are
Faraday's lines of force, which graphically describe how the force
fields of electricity and magnetism permeate space. If one graphs the
magnetic fields of the Earth, for example, one finds that the lines emanate from the north polar region and then fall back to the Earth in the
south polar region. Similarly, if one were to graph the electric field
lines of a lightning rod in a thunderstorm, one would find that the lines
of force concentrate at the tip of the lightning rod. Empty space, to
Faraday, was not empty at all, but was filled with lines of force that
could make distant objects move. (Because of Faraday's povertystricken youth, he was illiterate in mathematics, and as a consequence
his notebooks are full not of equations but of hand-drawn diagrams of
these lines of force. Ironically, his lack of mathematical training led
him to create the beautiful diagrams of lines of force that now can be
found in any physics textbook. In science a physical picture is often
more important than the mathematics used to describe it.)
Historians have speculated on how Faraday was led to his discovery of force fields, one of the most important concepts in all of science.
In fact, the sum total of all modern physics is written in the language of
Faraday's fields. In 1831, he made the key breakthrough regarding
force fields that changed civilization forever. One day, he was moving
a child's magnet over a coil of wire and he noticed that he was able to
generate an electric current in the wire, without ever touching it. This
meant that a magnet's invisible field could push electrons in a wire
across empty space, creating a current.
Faraday's "force fields," which were previously thought to be useless, idle doodlings, were real, material forces that could move objects
and generate power. Today the light that you are using to read this page
is probably energized by Faraday's discovery about electromagnetism.
died in 1829 Faraday was free to make a series of stunning breakthroughs that led to the creation of generators that would energize entire cities and change the course of world civilization.
The key to Faraday's greatest discoveries was his "force fields." If
one places iron filings over a magnet, one finds that the iron filings
create a spiderweb-like pattern that fills up all of space. These are
Faraday's lines of force, which graphically describe how the force
fields of electricity and magnetism permeate space. If one graphs the
magnetic fields of the Earth, for example, one finds that the lines emanate from the north polar region and then fall back to the Earth in the
south polar region. Similarly, if one were to graph the electric field
lines of a lightning rod in a thunderstorm, one would find that the lines
of force concentrate at the tip of the lightning rod. Empty space, to
Faraday, was not empty at all, but was filled with lines of force that
could make distant objects move. (Because of Faraday's povertystricken youth, he was illiterate in mathematics, and as a consequence
his notebooks are full not of equations but of hand-drawn diagrams of
these lines of force. Ironically, his lack of mathematical training led
him to create the beautiful diagrams of lines of force that now can be
found in any physics textbook. In science a physical picture is often
more important than the mathematics used to describe it.)
Historians have speculated on how Faraday was led to his discovery of force fields, one of the most important concepts in all of science.
In fact, the sum total of all modern physics is written in the language of
Faraday's fields. In 1831, he made the key breakthrough regarding
force fields that changed civilization forever. One day, he was moving
a child's magnet over a coil of wire and he noticed that he was able to
generate an electric current in the wire, without ever touching it. This
meant that a magnet's invisible field could push electrons in a wire
across empty space, creating a current.
Faraday's "force fields," which were previously thought to be useless, idle doodlings, were real, material forces that could move objects
and generate power. Today the light that you are using to read this page
is probably energized by Faraday's discovery about electromagnetism.