To end this week, we wrap up electricity and magnetism with the fourth and final of Maxwell’s equations. this one includes Maxwell’s own personal contribution to these: This is sort of the mirror image of Faraday’s Law from yesterday, with the curl of the magnetic field on the left, and stuff related to a change… Continue reading The Advent Calendar of Physics: Ampère and Maxwell
Category: History of Science
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Faraday
Moving along through our countdown to Newton’s birthday, we have an equation that combines two other titans of British science: This is the third of Maxwell’s equations (named after the great Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell), but it originates with Michael Faraday, one of the greatest experimentalists of the day. Faraday was a fascinating guy,… Continue reading The Advent Calendar of Physics: Faraday
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Gauss and Maxwell
As the advent calendar moves into the E&M portion of the season, there are a number of possible ways to approach this. I could go with fairly specific formulae for various aspects, but that would take a while and might close out some other areas of physics. In the end, all of classical E&M comes… Continue reading The Advent Calendar of Physics: Gauss and Maxwell
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Newton’s Gravity
We kicked off our countdown to Newton’s birthday with his equations of motion, so it seems fitting to close out the section on classical mechanics with another of Newton’s equations, this time the Law of Universal Gravitation: Like all the other equations to this point, I’m cribbing this from the formula sheet for my just-completed… Continue reading The Advent Calendar of Physics: Newton’s Gravity
The Infinity Puzzle by Frank Close
One of the things that is sometimes very frustrating (to me, at least) about popular physics books is that they rush very quickly through the physics that we already know, in order to spend time talking about wildly speculative ideas. This not only gives some of these books a very short shelf life, as their… Continue reading The Infinity Puzzle by Frank Close
The Physics Book by Clifford Pickover
It’s hard to go more than a couple of days without seeing another “imminent death of publishing” article somewhere, predicting the ultimate triumph of ebooks, There’s one category of books that I expect to remain safe for the foreseeable future, though, namely books that are specifically constructed to be aesthetically pleasing. In other words, coffee-table… Continue reading The Physics Book by Clifford Pickover
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Using Energy
For the sixth day of our advent countdown to Newton’s birthday, we have the first equation that really departs from the usual notation. I’ve gotten to kind of like the way the Matter and Interactions curriculum handles this, though, so we’ll use their notation: This is what Chabay and Sherwood refer to as the Energy… Continue reading The Advent Calendar of Physics: Using Energy
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Introducing Energy
Moving along in our countdown to Newton’s birthday, we start to deal with equations that Sir Isaac never would’ve seen, because they deal with more abstract quantities than he worked with. The first and in some ways most important of these is energy: This is the full and correct expression for the energy of a… Continue reading The Advent Calendar of Physics: Introducing Energy
The Advent Calendar of Physics: The Spring’s the Thing
Continuing our countdown to Newton’s birthday, let’s acknowledge the contributions of one of his contemporaries and rivals with today’s equation: This is, of course, Hooke’s Law for a spring, which he famously published in 1660: ceiiinosssttuv Clears everything right up, doesn’t it? OK, maybe not. This one’s not only in Latin, it’s a cryptogram, unscrambling… Continue reading The Advent Calendar of Physics: The Spring’s the Thing
The Advent Calendar of Physics: Newton and Einstein
We kicked off the countdown to Newton’s birthday with his second law of motion, which is almost but not quite everything you need to understand and predict the motion of objects. The missing piece is today’s equation: This is the full and correct definition of momentum, good for any speed all the way up to… Continue reading The Advent Calendar of Physics: Newton and Einstein