(April 30, 2014 at 9:33 am)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: So in that sense, what IS electromagnetism is as elusive as this computer I'm typing on.
A little history might shed some light on this. In the 1860's, Maxwell put together all the equations that were known then about electric fields and magnetic fields. There were four of them in all. When he solved them, like you would solve 4 equations in algebra, the solutions was astounding: it was a wave whose components were the electric field in one direction, the magnetic field, in a direction perpendicular to the electric field, and perpendicular to these two, was the motion of that wave, which turned out to be the speed of light. This was the first time that electricity, magnetism and optics were linked. Twenty years after, Hertz invented a simple apparatus that would produce these electromagnetic waves, the forerunner to the radio and Marconi's wireless transmission. But it was not until Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory were fully developed before we began to understand what electromagnetism really meant. The theory is known as Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), that came about the 1960's, a full 100 years after Maxwell's historic accomplishment. Words cannot begin to describe this theory.
