WEBVTT - Who really wrote Maxwell's equations? 0:00:05.440 --> 0:00:08.680 And I gotta tell you Maxwell is hard to read 0:00:09.320 --> 0:00:14.880 for weird, weird reasons. Maxwell, it's not all mathematical, it's 0:00:15.080 --> 0:00:18.000 mostly words and with a little bit of math, but 0:00:18.079 --> 0:00:24.360 the math is confusingly written. And Maxwell makes ridiculous amounts 0:00:24.480 --> 0:00:28.319 of mathematical mistakes. The first one I thought, I'm like, 0:00:28.440 --> 0:00:32.000 I must be wrong. This is Maxwell, And then I realized, no, 0:00:32.520 --> 0:00:36.720 every paper is eighty pages long and has eighty mistakes 0:00:36.760 --> 0:00:37.120 in it. 0:00:37.159 --> 0:00:40.400 Like, oh no, it's good to know you could be 0:00:40.440 --> 0:00:42.680 famous and make tons of mistakes. 0:00:43.320 --> 0:00:47.920 And it's actually inspiring. But yeah, Maxwell had this amazing 0:00:48.080 --> 0:00:52.800 mind to take these crazy ideas from Faraday, which no 0:00:52.840 --> 0:00:55.320 one had thought of things this way, and put it 0:00:55.360 --> 0:01:01.160 in math terms. And I have nothing but the utmost 0:01:01.240 --> 0:01:06.039 respect and love for Maxwell, and also reading him can 0:01:06.080 --> 0:01:07.200 give you a stomach. 0:01:06.920 --> 0:01:10.880 In That's a little snippet from our conversation today about 0:01:10.880 --> 0:01:14.920 the history of science, specifically understanding who really came up 0:01:15.000 --> 0:01:18.200 with Maxwell's equations, how much did he rely on the 0:01:18.240 --> 0:01:21.560 experiments done before him, and how much did the theorists 0:01:21.600 --> 0:01:25.640 after him clean up his work. Welcome to Daniel and 0:01:25.720 --> 0:01:28.000 Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. 0:01:41.120 --> 0:01:44.560 Hello, I'm Kelly Waiter Smith and I don't know anything 0:01:44.720 --> 0:01:47.600 about Faraday or Maxwell or any of the people that 0:01:47.600 --> 0:01:49.120 we're going to be talking about today, though I seem 0:01:49.160 --> 0:01:52.440 to remember Faraday being associated with the cage of some sort. Daniel, 0:01:52.440 --> 0:01:56.040 did we let him out of the cage? Eventually he's 0:01:56.080 --> 0:01:56.640 still in there? 0:01:56.680 --> 0:01:58.480 Oh my god, somebody let him out. 0:01:59.720 --> 0:01:59.880 Hi. 0:02:00.080 --> 0:02:02.720 I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I've been taught 0:02:02.720 --> 0:02:05.040 the standard lore of physics history. 0:02:05.200 --> 0:02:10.680 WHOA Does every physics class teach standard physics history lore? 0:02:10.840 --> 0:02:12.360 Or are there some classes where you just do the 0:02:12.400 --> 0:02:14.360 actual science with no history. 0:02:14.680 --> 0:02:14.720 No. 0:02:14.840 --> 0:02:17.600 I feel like there's a standard set of anecdotes that 0:02:17.639 --> 0:02:21.040 get passed down from generation to generation. You get a 0:02:21.040 --> 0:02:23.240 little bit of the flavor of the people when you're 0:02:23.280 --> 0:02:27.000 learning about the equations sometimes, but mostly it's just the equations, 0:02:27.480 --> 0:02:30.320 and it's usually not the equations the way those folks 0:02:30.320 --> 0:02:33.720 wrote them. It's usually always in the modern notation, which 0:02:33.760 --> 0:02:36.480 I find a little confusing, because, like, you know, Newton 0:02:36.520 --> 0:02:40.600 didn't write equations mathematically. He wrote sentences and he used 0:02:40.720 --> 0:02:43.400 verbs and stuff like this, and so it's funny to say, 0:02:43.400 --> 0:02:45.639 and then Newton wrote down this equation, It's like, well, 0:02:45.639 --> 0:02:48.880 that didn't actually happen, did it? So? Yeah, it's confusing, 0:02:49.360 --> 0:02:49.680 all right. 0:02:49.720 --> 0:02:52.200 So we're about to talk to a historian of physics 0:02:52.200 --> 0:02:54.079 who has a bunch of amazing stories we're going to 0:02:54.120 --> 0:02:56.480 hear today. But do you have a favorite history of 0:02:56.520 --> 0:02:57.320 physics story? 0:02:57.680 --> 0:03:00.639 I do have a favorite. Actually, I'm not sure it's 0:03:00.680 --> 0:03:03.640 family friendly. It's a story of one guy who actually 0:03:03.639 --> 0:03:06.960 goes on to win the Nobel Prize, who every evening 0:03:07.200 --> 0:03:11.359 would come in and urinate on the competitors experiment so 0:03:11.400 --> 0:03:13.400 that they weren't ready to run for the day. No, 0:03:14.080 --> 0:03:16.760 the lore is that this was captured on video, though 0:03:16.800 --> 0:03:19.960 I've never actually seen the video myself, but yeah, this 0:03:20.080 --> 0:03:22.960 is a story bouncing around the halls of particle physics. 0:03:23.120 --> 0:03:25.280 Oh my gosh, how long ago was this? 0:03:25.280 --> 0:03:27.120 This apparently was in the seventies. 0:03:27.360 --> 0:03:27.640 Huh. 0:03:27.680 --> 0:03:31.360 So my favorite urine based physics story is it hennick Brand, 0:03:31.520 --> 0:03:35.080 the guy who discovered phosphorus by boiling his own urine 0:03:35.080 --> 0:03:36.880 and finding it accidentally. Is that right? 0:03:37.680 --> 0:03:40.480 No, nothing that glamorous. And I won't repeat the names 0:03:40.480 --> 0:03:42.200 in the story because I've been told by other people 0:03:42.280 --> 0:03:44.960 that the story is apocryphal. But whether it's true or not, 0:03:45.120 --> 0:03:47.520 it's a story which exists in the halls of physics 0:03:47.600 --> 0:03:49.200 and is told with much relish. 0:03:49.400 --> 0:03:53.160 But my urine story is true, right, not apocryphal. 0:03:54.360 --> 0:03:56.800 I can't fact check that myself, but it sounds right. 0:03:56.840 --> 0:03:57.480 Okay, all right? 0:03:57.680 --> 0:04:00.360 We had a three D printed trophy for Bafest based 0:04:00.400 --> 0:04:03.080 on a famous painting of this man boiling his urine 0:04:03.200 --> 0:04:06.040 to discover phosphorus. Anyway, So now that we've told some 0:04:06.120 --> 0:04:09.120 good stories, some true, some maybe not so true, should 0:04:09.160 --> 0:04:12.920 we transition to the definitely true stories that Kathy has 0:04:12.920 --> 0:04:13.520 for us today? 0:04:13.880 --> 0:04:16.240 That's right. Neither of us are historians of physics, so 0:04:16.320 --> 0:04:19.159 we reached out to Kathy Joseph, who is an expert 0:04:19.160 --> 0:04:22.960 in the history of electromagnetism. How all these crazy personalities 0:04:23.040 --> 0:04:25.600 wove their work together to give us the understanding that 0:04:25.640 --> 0:04:28.400 we have today and maybe the gaps that exist in 0:04:28.440 --> 0:04:31.120 those modern stories and what we can learn from digging 0:04:31.160 --> 0:04:33.960 in detail into the past. Kathy is great because she 0:04:34.000 --> 0:04:37.200 actually goes back and reads the original papers written by 0:04:37.240 --> 0:04:40.279 these folks rather than just trusting the modern summaries. 0:04:41.000 --> 0:04:43.600 I love that about Kathy, and I love her sense 0:04:43.600 --> 0:04:44.680 of humor. So let's jump in. 0:04:48.360 --> 0:04:51.240 So it's my pleasure to welcome to the show. Kathy Joseph. 0:04:51.600 --> 0:04:53.839 She's a very well known YouTuber who has a channel 0:04:53.880 --> 0:04:57.240 about the history of physics. It's called Kathy Love's Physics. 0:04:57.400 --> 0:04:59.799 Check it out. She also was a high school physics 0:04:59.800 --> 0:05:02.560 tea for many years and is the author of the 0:05:02.720 --> 0:05:07.239 very entertaining and illuminating book The Lightning Tamers. Kathy, Welcome 0:05:07.279 --> 0:05:07.720 to the show. 0:05:08.040 --> 0:05:09.080 Thanks for having me. 0:05:09.600 --> 0:05:12.120 Thanks very much for being on. Tell us how you 0:05:12.279 --> 0:05:16.640 ended up being a physics history YouTuber when you were 0:05:16.680 --> 0:05:20.080 originally a physics PhD student and a physics high school teacher. 0:05:20.320 --> 0:05:22.599 Connect those dots for us. What is Kathy's history? 0:05:23.000 --> 0:05:26.880 Ah? Well, I've always been sort of interested in history, 0:05:26.920 --> 0:05:30.680 but much more from the historical fiction point of view. 0:05:31.200 --> 0:05:35.239 I like learning about how ordinary people lived in the past. 0:05:35.960 --> 0:05:40.960 So I always studied history by just looking into different 0:05:40.960 --> 0:05:44.800 people and enjoying their stories, and with a caveat that 0:05:44.880 --> 0:05:50.400 I know that everything I was getting was not necessarily true, 0:05:50.880 --> 0:05:53.080 which I think helped me in the future because I'm 0:05:53.200 --> 0:05:56.680 always been suspicious of everything I read. It's like, is 0:05:56.720 --> 0:06:01.400 that historically true or not? Because I did that, and 0:06:01.440 --> 0:06:07.200 then I ended up, through my various pass in my career, 0:06:08.000 --> 0:06:13.760 helping someone edit a book on non destructive testing, which 0:06:13.800 --> 0:06:17.160 is just as exciting as it sounds. It's an engineering 0:06:17.200 --> 0:06:23.719 book like how to test if different devices are okay 0:06:24.120 --> 0:06:27.480 or different items are okay, like is there a weakness 0:06:27.520 --> 0:06:33.480 in the line of train and without breaking it up? 0:06:34.360 --> 0:06:37.640 And they had different sections on different ways to test things, 0:06:38.200 --> 0:06:41.640 and I ended up editing this section on X rays 0:06:42.040 --> 0:06:44.800 and I'm like, well, let's look into the history of 0:06:44.920 --> 0:06:47.960 X rays a little bit to spice this up a 0:06:47.960 --> 0:06:51.440 little bit. And the history of X rays is amazing. 0:06:51.560 --> 0:06:57.680 There's been poetry, there's crazy, crazy things. And I started 0:06:57.720 --> 0:07:02.000 to just look into the every once in a while 0:07:02.240 --> 0:07:05.440 just for my own edification. And then I ended up 0:07:05.440 --> 0:07:07.839 being a high school physics teacher, which I loved. 0:07:08.160 --> 0:07:12.040 Wow, thank you for your service. That's really the front 0:07:12.040 --> 0:07:13.400 lines of education right there. 0:07:13.840 --> 0:07:16.240 It is the front lines of education. But it is 0:07:16.720 --> 0:07:20.880 also the place where you can make the most difference. 0:07:21.640 --> 0:07:26.280 Like if you talk to anyone who did any accomplishment 0:07:26.360 --> 0:07:29.120 in life, nine times out of ten they say they 0:07:29.120 --> 0:07:30.640 were inspired by a high school teacher. 0:07:30.920 --> 0:07:31.440 Yeah. 0:07:31.480 --> 0:07:33.760 Absolutely, And shout out to all the high school science 0:07:33.760 --> 0:07:37.480 teachers out there who are inspiring the next generation of 0:07:37.560 --> 0:07:40.160 scientists who are going to create the next layer of history. 0:07:40.360 --> 0:07:44.680 Amen, How does writing pop science differ when you're writing 0:07:44.880 --> 0:07:47.080 pop historical science. 0:07:47.520 --> 0:07:47.920 Is it a. 0:07:47.880 --> 0:07:50.200 Different set of skills that you need to be writing 0:07:50.240 --> 0:07:53.280 about the history, or a different set of research techniques? 0:07:53.760 --> 0:07:55.320 Or did you learn everything you needed when you were 0:07:55.320 --> 0:07:56.480 working on your physics PhD? 0:07:56.920 --> 0:08:01.560 Working on my physics PhD? I mean nothing except that 0:08:03.520 --> 0:08:06.640 except that the way I was trying to work on 0:08:06.760 --> 0:08:11.400 it was not working for me. And the way I 0:08:11.480 --> 0:08:15.040 approach looking at the history is as a way to 0:08:15.120 --> 0:08:20.280 teach the physics. It's always a way to teach the physics. 0:08:20.320 --> 0:08:23.720 And it's a mystery story. Every single one of them 0:08:23.800 --> 0:08:26.160 is a mystery story. Who did it? And why? 0:08:28.360 --> 0:08:30.840 I love the way that you approach history. You make 0:08:30.880 --> 0:08:34.400 it so personal because science is just people, right. It's 0:08:34.440 --> 0:08:38.120 weird people having accidents and rivalries and writing grumpy letters 0:08:38.120 --> 0:08:40.040 back and forth. And I think a lot of people 0:08:40.080 --> 0:08:42.120 when they think of the history of physics, they only 0:08:42.480 --> 0:08:45.680 take the sort of sanitized, summarized version in a textbook, 0:08:45.720 --> 0:08:48.640 like a straight line from not understanding to understanding, when 0:08:48.720 --> 0:08:52.320 really it's like a crazy zigzag that later people patched 0:08:52.400 --> 0:08:54.520 up and they removed a lot of the fun bits. 0:08:54.679 --> 0:08:56.720 So I was hoping that you would take us through 0:08:56.720 --> 0:09:00.360 some of the history of our understanding of electromagnetism, some 0:09:00.400 --> 0:09:03.280 of the messy discoveries and the fun stories. Where do 0:09:03.280 --> 0:09:05.520 you think is a fun place to jump in? Take 0:09:05.600 --> 0:09:08.600 us back to sort of like before we understood electricity 0:09:08.640 --> 0:09:11.480 at all, What were people doing to try to understand it? 0:09:11.600 --> 0:09:14.680 What were the experiments that were helping us figure it out? Well. 0:09:14.880 --> 0:09:18.440 One of the things that really surprised me was that 0:09:18.720 --> 0:09:23.920 in the seventeen hundreds, electricity wasn't really a science. It 0:09:23.960 --> 0:09:28.000 was an entertainment and it was also a way to 0:09:28.080 --> 0:09:31.280 get ahead in life. You could be a good musician, 0:09:31.800 --> 0:09:34.560 or you could be a scientist, or you could be 0:09:34.880 --> 0:09:38.960 a poet. Especially in France, the king who made Versailles, 0:09:39.600 --> 0:09:44.600 the Son King, he was very into using science as 0:09:44.600 --> 0:09:48.360 a way of entertainment and a way of showing that 0:09:48.440 --> 0:09:54.040 you were noble, if you were elite. You spoke poetry 0:09:54.080 --> 0:09:57.080 and you knew about science, and you did crazy experiments. 0:09:57.400 --> 0:10:03.160 And there's all these amazing, amazing drawings from that time period. 0:10:03.280 --> 0:10:06.360 Like the cover of my book has this little dry 0:10:06.440 --> 0:10:10.160 out circle of this woman in this beautiful giant ball 0:10:10.240 --> 0:10:15.640 gown rubbing this sphere, and then there's a child hung 0:10:15.720 --> 0:10:20.040 up by strings off the air and his feet is 0:10:20.160 --> 0:10:24.440 touching the ball, so the electricity flows through him to 0:10:24.559 --> 0:10:29.680 this little girl in another little cute, elegant gown standing 0:10:29.720 --> 0:10:34.720 on a wooden platform, having little electric pieces of paper 0:10:34.800 --> 0:10:38.719 or flaff for gold foil rise to her hand as 0:10:38.760 --> 0:10:44.360 she's electrified. And there's so many pictures. In fact, if 0:10:44.400 --> 0:10:47.360 you look really closely at the book, you can see 0:10:47.400 --> 0:10:50.560 the French letters from the words on the other side 0:10:50.600 --> 0:10:55.160 of the page, because they were printed out in little books. 0:10:55.200 --> 0:10:57.840 And I went to this museum called the Spark Museum 0:10:58.240 --> 0:11:03.040 and I got to hold an original book from seventeen 0:11:03.200 --> 0:11:07.400 forty nine. It was tiny. It was like two inches 0:11:07.520 --> 0:11:11.280 long and one inch wide. It was tiny so that 0:11:11.320 --> 0:11:14.360 they could put them in their little pockets of their 0:11:14.800 --> 0:11:20.040 elegant gowns and what have you. There whereas they could 0:11:20.080 --> 0:11:24.199 take it out and look at these incredibly intricate portraits 0:11:24.240 --> 0:11:25.680 that they put inside them. 0:11:26.120 --> 0:11:28.960 Wow, we should start making two inch versions of modern textbooks. 0:11:28.960 --> 0:11:30.000 That would be prettyhilarious. 0:11:30.760 --> 0:11:32.319 Well, it sounds like a little cheat sheet for like 0:11:32.360 --> 0:11:34.920 how to be interesting at a party. I need more 0:11:34.960 --> 0:11:37.800 pockets to hold those so that people will invite me places. 0:11:37.920 --> 0:11:40.120 Physics is definitely not the way to be interesting at 0:11:40.120 --> 0:11:41.839 a party. Yeah, it kind of it. 0:11:41.800 --> 0:11:44.600 Could be, depending on the party. There are some pretty 0:11:44.600 --> 0:11:47.600 boring parties if you're trying to entertain with electricity at 0:11:47.600 --> 0:11:50.560 a time when we don't understand electricity, well are There 0:11:50.640 --> 0:11:53.880 also a lot of stories of people hurting themselves or 0:11:53.920 --> 0:11:55.600 the children they're stringing up by their feet. 0:11:56.720 --> 0:12:01.920 Yes, not as many as you would expecting how dangerous 0:12:01.960 --> 0:12:05.360 it was, But I think that's because the time was 0:12:05.400 --> 0:12:09.679 so dangerous. They don't have antibiotics. You could die million 0:12:09.720 --> 0:12:14.800 ways from Sunday, and they sort of felt and many 0:12:14.880 --> 0:12:19.199 of them said, I want to die from electricity. There 0:12:19.280 --> 0:12:22.560 was this German scientist named Mathaa Bosa, one of my 0:12:22.679 --> 0:12:26.080 favorite scientists of all time, because he was a performer, 0:12:26.679 --> 0:12:31.000 a grand performer, and he would, for example, electrify a 0:12:31.040 --> 0:12:34.440 pretty woman by having her stand on something and while 0:12:34.559 --> 0:12:38.040 someone rubbed that sphere and then give her a kiss, 0:12:39.200 --> 0:12:43.400 and he called it venus electrificatas, and then he wrote 0:12:43.400 --> 0:12:46.920 a bad poetry about it, like, you know, I kissed 0:12:47.040 --> 0:12:51.319 venus standing on the wax. My lips trembled, my teeth 0:12:51.360 --> 0:12:54.120 almost broke. I can't remember the rest of them. 0:12:54.800 --> 0:12:56.760 It's a great kiss. And it was the idea that 0:12:56.800 --> 0:12:58.680 like he wanted to create a spark so that they 0:12:58.679 --> 0:13:01.800 would both be like wooin but it hurt. 0:13:03.200 --> 0:13:06.400 Oh, it wouldn't hurt with their hands, but it would 0:13:06.480 --> 0:13:07.800 sure hurt with your lips. 0:13:07.880 --> 0:13:08.200 Yeah. 0:13:08.240 --> 0:13:11.960 Wow. The history of flirting with physics is fascinating. But 0:13:12.080 --> 0:13:14.679 so physics is a way to like amaze and awe 0:13:14.720 --> 0:13:18.480 and entertain or at less electricity is at what point 0:13:18.480 --> 0:13:20.960 did people start to wonder like can we understand this, 0:13:21.280 --> 0:13:24.480 to do experiments to try to force the universe to 0:13:24.520 --> 0:13:27.520 reveal how it works. When did we really begin to 0:13:27.880 --> 0:13:28.559 understand it? 0:13:29.000 --> 0:13:33.760 Well, that kind of happened simultaneously. For example, there was 0:13:33.800 --> 0:13:39.439 this French scientist named du Fey, and he was the 0:13:39.480 --> 0:13:43.400 first person who made the sort of rules of electricity. 0:13:44.240 --> 0:13:48.840 He had this theory that if something was electrified and 0:13:48.920 --> 0:13:51.880 a neutral object came to it and stuck on it, 0:13:52.480 --> 0:13:56.320 the neutral object could absorb some of the electricity and 0:13:56.360 --> 0:13:59.400 then be repelled by it, which is what we think 0:13:59.440 --> 0:14:04.920 happens to And he did an experiment like that, and 0:14:05.040 --> 0:14:08.920 he had two charged rods and he's like, okay, if 0:14:08.920 --> 0:14:11.160 it repels from one. It's your repel from the other. 0:14:12.320 --> 0:14:15.040 But it didn't. It was attracted to the other, and 0:14:15.080 --> 0:14:17.240 then it was repelled by that and attracted to the 0:14:17.280 --> 0:14:20.120 first and went bouncing back and forth between these two 0:14:20.280 --> 0:14:23.480 charged objects, one made out of glass and one made 0:14:23.520 --> 0:14:27.359 of wax. So he said, there's two kinds of electricity, 0:14:28.840 --> 0:14:34.160 vitreous electricity or electricity that comes from glass, and resinous 0:14:34.360 --> 0:14:40.760 electricity or resin based, wax based. So Charles Sistine Devey 0:14:41.520 --> 0:14:45.880 was a real inspiration for Boza doing his crazy experiments. 0:14:46.440 --> 0:14:50.320 So I found that happens all through the history of science. 0:14:51.040 --> 0:14:56.800 Someone makes a real breakthrough on our understanding, but then 0:14:56.920 --> 0:15:01.600 someone else makes it popular by making a useful device 0:15:02.040 --> 0:15:06.520 or making a fun device or both. Like with X rays, 0:15:07.040 --> 0:15:11.960 they mostly thought it was fun for a while. Oops, yeah, exactly. 0:15:12.040 --> 0:15:15.960 They would go on traveling things and give X rays 0:15:16.000 --> 0:15:19.440 for you know, like a quarter, just for fun. 0:15:19.640 --> 0:15:20.920 With shockingly high doses. 0:15:21.000 --> 0:15:23.920 Right at first, No, because they couldn't figure out how 0:15:23.920 --> 0:15:27.360 to make shockingly high does. You had to stay there 0:15:27.440 --> 0:15:31.360 for a really long time because it just wouldn't work. 0:15:31.600 --> 0:15:34.040 It took a while to just figure out how to 0:15:34.200 --> 0:15:37.320 up the dose as well. But I'm Sorry, I got 0:15:37.360 --> 0:15:39.960 back onto X rays. But it's the true with all 0:15:40.000 --> 0:15:42.520 of it. It's not one at a time. And I 0:15:42.520 --> 0:15:46.120 think that is a problem with most history of science books, 0:15:46.640 --> 0:15:50.960 is that they focus on this one part of technology 0:15:51.080 --> 0:15:55.320 or one discovery or whatever, and they're not in isolation. 0:15:56.000 --> 0:15:59.920 The theory happens at the same time as the development 0:16:00.160 --> 0:16:04.080 and technologies, same times as it affecting the culture, and 0:16:04.160 --> 0:16:07.600 they're all intertwined with each other, and they're all influencing 0:16:07.680 --> 0:16:12.600 each other. And it's not linear like you were saying before. 0:16:12.760 --> 0:16:17.280 It's not like this person makes this person. Sometimes you 0:16:17.400 --> 0:16:22.360 go backwards. And one of our greatest discoveries was the 0:16:22.480 --> 0:16:26.400 discovery of the idea of electric fields, and that happened 0:16:26.440 --> 0:16:29.680 because a guy named Michael Faraday went, you know what, 0:16:29.800 --> 0:16:32.560 I've discovered so much, I should look in the history 0:16:33.520 --> 0:16:34.760 and see what it tells me. 0:16:35.480 --> 0:16:37.160 All right, So I want to hear all about the 0:16:37.200 --> 0:16:39.760 history of Michael Faraday and how that laid the groundwork 0:16:40.080 --> 0:16:43.680 for Maxwell to get maybe too much credit for Maxwell's equations. 0:16:43.720 --> 0:17:02.560 But first we have to take a quick break. All right, 0:17:02.600 --> 0:17:05.679 we're back and we're talking to historian Kathy Joseph of 0:17:05.720 --> 0:17:08.679 the YouTube channel Kathy loves physics, about how the history 0:17:08.760 --> 0:17:11.760 of electromagnetism and the history of physics in general is 0:17:11.800 --> 0:17:14.520 a little bit messier and a lot less linear than 0:17:14.560 --> 0:17:17.480 you might have thought, at least than I thought. So 0:17:17.600 --> 0:17:20.400 tell us about Michael Faraday and his experiments and what 0:17:20.480 --> 0:17:22.880 he helped us understand and how he did it. 0:17:23.200 --> 0:17:26.600 Oh, Michael Faraday is my favorite scientist of all time. 0:17:26.960 --> 0:17:29.200 I think that's the second time you've said that, isn't it. 0:17:30.240 --> 0:17:32.240 I think that means that you just are full of 0:17:32.359 --> 0:17:35.359 enthusiasm and love for your topic. I thought your favorite 0:17:35.400 --> 0:17:36.960 was the one who did the electric smooches. 0:17:37.480 --> 0:17:41.119 Oh shoot, no. 0:17:41.720 --> 0:17:43.240 It's okay. You kind of have a new favorite every 0:17:43.240 --> 0:17:45.040 ten minutes. Thoro all wonderful. 0:17:45.840 --> 0:17:49.760 Boat is one of my favorites. Okay, Michael Faraday is 0:17:49.880 --> 0:17:51.240 clear and away my favorite. 0:17:51.680 --> 0:17:53.720 Right. Why is that because he was a fan of 0:17:53.760 --> 0:17:54.520 the history as well. 0:17:55.119 --> 0:17:59.560 Partially you asked me to talk about Michael Veraday. But 0:18:00.160 --> 0:18:03.200 first start saying, I didn't start off by thinking the 0:18:03.280 --> 0:18:07.560 history of science was not important. I started off by 0:18:07.600 --> 0:18:11.800 thinking the history of science was interesting to me, and 0:18:12.080 --> 0:18:14.879 I thought it might be a little bit helpful for 0:18:14.960 --> 0:18:21.439 helping other people understand science. But it's turned into a 0:18:21.600 --> 0:18:26.320 deep belief that the science and technology doesn't come from 0:18:26.359 --> 0:18:29.280 the equations, it comes from how we got the equations. 0:18:29.920 --> 0:18:36.160 And no one has been more influential and more poetic 0:18:37.200 --> 0:18:41.720 than Michael Farday. Michael Faraday was born in the slums 0:18:41.760 --> 0:18:45.439 of London to a mostly out of work and sick father, 0:18:46.600 --> 0:18:50.119 and he went to school for a week before his 0:18:50.320 --> 0:18:54.359 teacher told his big brother to get a switch to 0:18:54.440 --> 0:18:58.000 hit him with because he called his brother Robert instead 0:18:58.000 --> 0:19:02.600 of Robert. And the other went to the mom and said, 0:19:03.040 --> 0:19:05.320 this is what I'm supposed to do. And the mom 0:19:05.400 --> 0:19:07.840 marched in there and took both kids out of school 0:19:08.800 --> 0:19:12.760 and homeschooled four kids. She had two daughters as well, 0:19:12.800 --> 0:19:16.679 who weren't allowed to go to school. And she knew 0:19:17.680 --> 0:19:20.080 no math. And he never learned math. He had a 0:19:20.160 --> 0:19:23.080 terrible math phobia. They had no books. 0:19:24.119 --> 0:19:26.320 One of the greatest physicists of all time, you're telling 0:19:26.320 --> 0:19:27.680 me you had a math phobia. 0:19:28.480 --> 0:19:34.680 Terrible math phobia. He called it hieroglyphics. He never wrote 0:19:34.680 --> 0:19:37.560 an equation. He didn't really understand them. 0:19:38.080 --> 0:19:41.040 He never wrote an equation. How does Faraday do all 0:19:41.040 --> 0:19:43.680 of his physics and leave such an imprint on history 0:19:43.680 --> 0:19:45.040 of physics without writing an equation. 0:19:45.800 --> 0:19:50.920 It's amazing. Well, Maxwell actually read Faraday and said this 0:19:51.119 --> 0:19:58.320 is mathematical. It's just not in mathematical terms. So to Maxwell, 0:19:59.000 --> 0:20:02.560 Faraday was mathematical. It just you know, you can do 0:20:02.760 --> 0:20:03.840 math and language. 0:20:04.160 --> 0:20:06.960 Does that mean that Faraday's papers are in like sentences 0:20:07.080 --> 0:20:10.399 rather than in symbols. He's like writing descriptions of what 0:20:10.440 --> 0:20:14.159 he sees and describing relationships, but just not using like 0:20:14.280 --> 0:20:16.080 equals and numbers. 0:20:15.680 --> 0:20:19.040 Right, not using equals and numbers and stuff like that. 0:20:19.240 --> 0:20:26.080 But also Faraday had this amazing knack of seeing sort 0:20:26.080 --> 0:20:33.240 of what lies underneath our world and developing it. He 0:20:33.320 --> 0:20:36.960 was a chemist and a physicist, so he had. 0:20:36.800 --> 0:20:39.200 No education except for his mom. 0:20:39.560 --> 0:20:40.400 Except for his mom. 0:20:40.560 --> 0:20:42.080 Big props to Faraday's mom. 0:20:42.320 --> 0:20:45.879 Big props who he loved. His relationship with his mom 0:20:46.040 --> 0:20:49.199 is so sweet. I'm getting out of myself. He was 0:20:49.240 --> 0:20:52.400 this poor kid. He always hanging out at a bookseller's 0:20:52.880 --> 0:20:55.359 just to look at the books in their window. And 0:20:55.440 --> 0:20:59.880 the bookseller, this guy named Merbau, gave him a job 0:21:00.119 --> 0:21:03.200 as a delivery boy and then gave him a job 0:21:03.280 --> 0:21:06.919 as a bookbinder and let him read the books that 0:21:07.040 --> 0:21:09.960 were in the bookshelf, and there was a book there 0:21:10.359 --> 0:21:14.960 by a woman named Jane Marcette called Conversations in Chemistry. 0:21:16.359 --> 0:21:18.879 There was this guy named Humphrey Davy who was a 0:21:19.200 --> 0:21:24.159 famous chemist, like the world's famous chemist, who was doing 0:21:24.240 --> 0:21:29.520 experiments with this giant battery to separate chemicals and discovered 0:21:29.520 --> 0:21:32.960 a whole bunch of different chemicals. This was eighteen hundred 0:21:33.040 --> 0:21:38.760 about his talks were the most popular thing in England, 0:21:38.800 --> 0:21:41.480 Like they had to make the road one way to 0:21:41.600 --> 0:21:45.560 deal with traffic when he gave a talk. Wow, he 0:21:45.720 --> 0:21:50.119 has letters to his parents and brother about like, you know, 0:21:50.200 --> 0:21:53.560 I'm very excited about this talk. They're reselling my tickets 0:21:53.600 --> 0:21:56.480 at fifty pounds and I'm like, oh my god, that's 0:21:56.480 --> 0:21:58.919 what they pay people for a year of labor at 0:21:58.960 --> 0:21:59.359 the time. 0:21:59.400 --> 0:22:01.320 I mean, like, he's like Taylor Swift. 0:22:01.480 --> 0:22:04.880 He was the Taylor Swift. Poets would go to him 0:22:05.800 --> 0:22:10.560 for new language and like famous poets cooler Ridge and 0:22:11.800 --> 0:22:14.840 Southby and I don't know very much about poetry, but 0:22:15.320 --> 0:22:18.720 they would go to him, and he was very, very popular. 0:22:19.040 --> 0:22:22.119 And this woman went to his talk named James Marsette, 0:22:22.320 --> 0:22:24.359 and she's like, I wish I knew some chemistry so 0:22:24.400 --> 0:22:27.560 I could understand this better. So she asked her husband 0:22:27.600 --> 0:22:30.760 to help her, and then she wrote this book, Conversations 0:22:30.760 --> 0:22:33.960 and Chemistry, and that's how Faraday learned chemistry. 0:22:34.480 --> 0:22:37.439 I didn't realize women were so important in Faraday's education. 0:22:37.920 --> 0:22:38.560 You know what. 0:22:39.240 --> 0:22:44.679 Women keep on coming up throughout everyone's story and what 0:22:45.080 --> 0:22:48.520 I found so lovely about Faraday. Lots of times when 0:22:48.560 --> 0:22:51.720 you go through the history of science partially this is 0:22:51.720 --> 0:22:58.520 a different time period, so you find people who would 0:22:58.560 --> 0:23:03.160 affect you know, sex and racism and classism and all 0:23:03.200 --> 0:23:09.639 this stuff, and they disappoint you sometimes and sometimes people 0:23:09.680 --> 0:23:13.320 you don't expect turn out to be wonderful. But when 0:23:13.359 --> 0:23:15.880 you read their private letters, you get to know who 0:23:15.920 --> 0:23:19.920 they are as people at their bad points, at their 0:23:19.960 --> 0:23:23.880 good points. And yes, I judge people. I'm a historian. 0:23:24.080 --> 0:23:28.760 That's how it works. And Faraday, I haven't read everything. 0:23:29.359 --> 0:23:33.800 He could disappoint me, but he was always everything I've read. 0:23:34.160 --> 0:23:37.720 He was kind, and he was supportive, and he was lovely. 0:23:38.320 --> 0:23:43.560 I call him the original slam poet, like slam poets 0:23:43.680 --> 0:23:48.200 do poetry without rhyming. And if you read his talks, 0:23:48.320 --> 0:23:52.240 he says stuff like I'm no poet, but if you 0:23:52.520 --> 0:23:56.000 listen carefully, a poem will form in your mind. 0:23:57.119 --> 0:24:00.359