Boltzmann and Goethe's Faust
Ludwig Boltzmann, reading Maxwell’s equations, quoted Goethe’s Faust: «Was it a god who wrote these signs?».
Boltzmann’s astonishment was not naive: four lines of mathematics encompass the behaviour of all electricity, of all magnetism, and — as an inevitable consequence — predict the existence of a wave that propagates at speed . Light, which humanity had observed for millennia without understanding it, springs out of a couple of equations that apparently spoke only of wires and magnets.
It is the central moment of the whole history of unification: electricity, magnetism and optics, disciplines separate until then, become a single discipline. From that moment on, every new synthesis in physics — relativity, the electroweak theory, the search for quantum gravity — has taken Maxwell as its model (Einstein and Infeld 1938; Simonyi 2012; Feynman 1963).
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Topics: Electromagnetic waves Concepts: Maxwell’s equations
Related exercises: Problem — Speed of light from vacuum constants · Problem — E-B symmetry and asymmetries · Problem — EM waves without a medium