Experimental Blog # 173

Quotations from "Hidden Attraction" - The Mystery and History of Magnetism by Gerrit L. Verschuur and "The Void" by Frank Close

From "Hidden Attraction":
"  .. gravity, electricity, and magnetism all showed an inverse square law of force .."
"The equations{Maxwell's} describing electric and magnetic phenomena involved time as a parameter, and hence also a velocity. Up to then no one had expected that to understand the nature of lodestone one needed to take time into account."
"The stunning conclusion was that electrical and magnetic forces, under the umbrella of a new description, electromagnetism, traveled at the speed of light."
" ... the original questions about the nature of magnetism led scientists into a new world, a universe filled with electromagnetic waves and electromagnetic phenomena .."
" ..we have created a new world and gained precious new insights into our place in the scheme of things on earth and in the rest of the universe."
" .. astronomical studies of the farthest reaches of the universe depend on being able to detect and interpret electromagnetic waves from space."

"Forming a reasonably correct idea of the atom and of the physics of its behavior allowed a hydrogen bomb, a small-scale version of a star, to be built."
" ... nothing that will ever be discovered in physics will undo the fact that an atomic bomb wiped out Hiroshima. The model of the atom that allowed the bomb to be built was an excellent approximation of the truth."

From "The Void":
"Every student of mechanics meets these laws < > It is certainly true that their application enables us to send spacecraft all the way to Jupiter and by applying the right amount of force at the right time, as dictated by Newton, the craft indeed arrives at its destination."

" ..there is no absolute measure of velocity, < >acceleration is different: its magnitude as measured in all inertial frames is the same."
"Newton's laws of motion < > In 300 years of careful experimentation their only failures are when applied to objects moving near to the speed of light, whence they are subsumed in Einstein's relativity theory, and at atomic length scales, where the laws of quantum mechanics replace them."
"While quantum mechanics makes precise statements about phenomena on subatomic length scales, it does so while ignoring the effects of gravity."
"As the universe expands, space expands but objects held together by electromagnetic forces, such as planets and stars, do not change size < > Electromagnetic radiation has nothing to hold it so its wavelength extends as the universe grows."