On Wed, Oct 30, 2024 at 4:53 PM Alan Grayson <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wednesday, October 30, 2024 at 1:46:46 PM UTC-6 John Clark wrote: > > *>>The greatest experimental physicist of the 19th century, Michael > Faraday, developed a model that can explain electromagnetic waves, and he > did it before the **Michelson **and Morley experiment. Faraday visualized > two fields that permeated all of space, an electric field and a magnetic > field; it can be thought of as arrows associated with every point in space > with the arrows indicating the direction the field was increasing or > decreasing and the length of the arrow indicating the magnitude of that > rate of increase. Faraday thought that if you changed the direction or the > length of just one of those arrows in one field then you would cause nearby > arrows in both fields to also change. However, although Faraday had keen > physical intuition, he was the last great physicist that lacked any > mathematical ability, and you need mathematics to determine exactly how the > fields change and to get actual numbers out of the idea that you can use. * > *The greatest theoretical physicist of the 19th century, James Maxwell, > had enormous mathematical ability and he was able to translate Faraday's > intuitive and imprecisefeeling into precise mathematical language. And when > Maxwell found a formula that allowed him to calculate the speed of > electromagnetic waves from just the Permeability and Permittivity of the > vacuum, and that speed happened to be the speed of light, then everybody > realized that light must be an electromagnetic wave and Faraday and Maxwell > must be correct. * > > > *> And then Quantum Field Theory (QFT) came along, and AFAIK, there is no > assumed underlying field for the photon, the force carrier for EM forces! > Baffling. AG* > *IN QFT the electromagnetic field (AKA Maxwell field) is quantized, the excitations of the field correspond to photons, the things we actually detect. * *John K Clark* -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv2Y_Rq9%3DUGTvXAoyJJ6E48pYHgAYRxVfZCqSyUJwbnWBg%40mail.gmail.com.
