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- Michael Faraday's Contributions to Understanding Magnetic Fields and Unity of Nature
Michael Faraday's Contributions to Understanding Magnetic Fields and Unity of Nature
Learn about Michael Faraday's groundbreaking work on visualizing magnetic fields and exploring the connections between electricity, magnetism, and light. Discover how his theories on magnetic fields paved the way for a deeper understanding of the unity of nature.
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Video Transcript
Why, my darling husband, of course.
When Faraday was 49, he began to battle severe memory loss and depression.
His work came to a standstill.
And although he never fully recovered, his greatest achievements still lay ahead.
Faraday had immersed himself so deeply in electrical and magnetic experiments that he
came to visualize the space around a magnet as filled with invisible lines of force.
A magnet was not simply the magnetized bar of iron that you could see.
It was also the unseen something in the space around the bar.
And that something he called a field.
a magnetic field.
Faraday believed in the unity of nature.
Having demonstrated the connections between electricity
and magnetism, he wondered, were these two forces also
connected to a third, light?
If he could only show a connection among these three
invisible phenomena, one of nature's most intimate secrets
would at last be revealed.
So what did he do?
He designed an experiment.
Faraday knew that light can travel as a wave.
Waves of light vibrate randomly in all directions.
But there's a way to isolate a single wave of light.
It's called polarization.
When light bounces off a reflective surface, like a mirror, it becomes polarized.
Faraday wanted to see if that single ray of light could be manipulated by the invisible
magnetic field.
The eyepiece contained a crystal that acted as a kind of picket fence for light.
could only pass through it if it was somehow moved by the magnet.
He placed a lantern before a mirror, one that he would only see through the eyepiece if
its reflection could pass through the picket fence.
If this is hard to understand, don't feel bad.
Scientists could not explain this phenomenon for another hundred years.
