14. Lesson 14: Waves and Maxwell’s Fields

Electromagnetic Waves

  What’s coming:

All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers, so that the aim of exact science is to reduce the problems of nature to the determination of quantities by operations with numbers. On Faraday’s Lines of Force (1856) a little unrefined for Cambridge Trinity College, but expected to do well: “He (Hopkins) was talking to me this evening about Maxwell. He says he is unquestionably the most extraordinary man he has met with in the whole range of his experience; he says it appears impossible for Maxwell to think incorrectly on physical subjects; that in his analysis, however, he is far more deficient; he looks upon him as a great genius, with all its eccentricities, and prophesies that one day he will shine as a liable in physical science, a prophecy in which all his fellow-students strenuously unite.” Maxwell

  Goals of this lesson:

Understanding, Appreciation, and Familiarity

I’d like you to Understand:

• How to predict the motion of a charged particle in a uniform electric field

• How to predict the motion of a charged particle in a magnetic field

• In words, not mathematically, what electromagnetic radiation is

I’d like you to Appreciate:

• The effort to put electricity and magnetism into a single, unifying theory

• How accelerator magnets work

I’d like you to become Familiar With:

• The role of James Clerk Maxwell in the history of physics