Sublime

Within a few years, James Clerk Maxwell transforms Faraday’s visionary insight into a system of equations describing the fields. He grasps that light is nothing but a swift ripple upon these webs, and that these ripples, at greater wavelengths, can bear signals. Hertz reproduces them in the laboratory,

“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are … part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.” — Max Planck (1858–1947), physicist

Einstein invented everything he was ever going to invent by the age of 25. The rest of his life was spent in a futile chase to find a force he couldn’t find called the Fifth Force—the unifying force.

Since the day Isaac Newton laid down his laws, a number of other kinds of laws have been suggested for fundamental physical systems. James Clerk Maxwell wrote down a set of equations for electricity and magnetism; Albert Einstein proposed an equation for the curvature of spacetime; Erwin Schrödinger suggested an equation for the wave function of a

As we have seen, Maxwell’s equations predicted that the speed of light should be the same whatever the speed of the source, and this has been confirmed by accurate measurements. It follows from this that if a pulse of light is emitted at a particular time at a particular point in space, then as time goes on it will spread out as a sphere of light w

FOR

On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies