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,

E&E factor: energy and excellence.

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

“ To see the beauty of the Maxwell theory it is necessary to move away from mechanical models and into the abstract world of fields. To see the beauty of quantum mechanics it is necessary to move away from verbal descriptions and into the abstract world of geometry. Mathematics is the language that nature speaks. The language of mathematics makes t

The German physicist Max Planck calculated the electric field in equilibrium in a hot box. To do this he used a trick: he imagined that the energy of the field is distributed in “quanta,” that is, in packets or lumps of energy. The procedure led to a result that perfectly reproduced what was measured (and therefore must be in some fashion correct)

Faraday’s experiments, simple and elegant, were carefully recorded in lab books that he bound himself, remembering the profession he had so happily left. In modern language, we would say he was a great chemist and a great physicist; Faraday described himself as a natural philosopher. With an uncanny gift for recognizing the salient points of an exp

This is what physicist Max Planck (the father of quantum mechanics), Einstein, and others observed: No matter how much you know, there is an infinite amount of chance and randomness in the universe.