James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879)

The 19th Century
Presentation 12 of 13

James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879)
A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (3rd Ed. 1981, Oxford).
The Preparation of Einstein.
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, February 21, 1984

Transcript:
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Place on tape from one voice and one mind, some overview of history, but not history of it. Next book sense of moving from event to event or complications or complication, but history from the standpoint of moving from person to person. If you look back over the series, they're always focused on a person. Our only guarantee of her or asity is to be able to put ourselves in the other person's shoes. The old American Indian prayer speaks eloquently of this. Let me not criticize my fellow man until I've walked a mile in his moccasins, we can empathize. We have the ability, believe it or not to project ourselves in sympathy to another person completely. It is a phenomenon known as love, and there are many ways in which love manifested sell. And the great mystery of love is the truth that we may displace our own selves with the care and love of another.
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And this exchange of selves is the mystery of love and the dynamic of the universe, the willingness to do this is our only guarantee of survival are agreeing to these conditions of life. And having understood that this is the only real dynamic there is, is the only guarantee we have that we may continue. So I have tried to place a overview of history in terms of people moving person to person and grouping the persons, according to what used to be called epochs or ages or periods of history. Okay. Actually the patterns that I've been cutting out are the result of many years of study, not just on myself or just my teachers, even though they were some of the best in the world, but of many, a prize individuals over a long time, there are histories of history. Now we have met a histories. We have ideas about philosophies of history that go far beyond what anyone might have ever understood or known before.
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And so the way in which I have cut out these patterns cut out. These groupings is not in terms of aggregation so much as in terms of what in higher mathematics would be called matrixes. And I have a range. The individuals within the matrix is so as to present a dynamic, the dynamic line of development being in all cases, they, what would be taken as the meaning in a V factor analysis of the dynamic of that matrix, leading to the next set of conditions. We're going to talk a little bit about vector analysis today and about its origin, um, in the 19th century. But, um, in tracing over the last four years, this kind of matrix history, moving person to person, I have sought to engender again, a vector align of meaning, which we would call development from a static standpoint, but which yields a purposefulness when finally understood in terms of its direction, its intensity, its culmination.
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We at every moment of this present inherit the responsibility of that meaningfulness of that purpose of illness. And frankly, from the standpoint of someone who understands a great deal of this, nothing is being done currently in our time to accept this burden. The only reason that we could not continue is that this condition of nonacceptance would become apparent to the universe. If it does, we will not last, not because of something in ourselves, not because of a flaw or a compulsion in ourselves, but because of a failure to meet the basic essential conditions of intelligent, purposeful life, the world is not dead. The universe is quite alive and we are constantly onstage in terms of the meaningfulness, meaning is the movement of truth. Justice. Plato said that time is the moving image of eternity. Meaning is the moving understanding of truth. The universe manifests true as a basic condition of integrity, only keeping the meaningfulness intact. Do we continue without that? There will indeed be nothing for us.
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So there is a rather somber undertone. There is a counter punctal, um, percussion, perhaps not always visible, but I draw it out because with the lecture today in the lecture next week, we will have come within view of our own time. I have brought the lecture series, the progression of matrixes up to the 20th century where we find ourselves a maroon is at where post historical man. We were once called in the forties when the condition was first, be beginning to be known, but I have left out several major connections, which I am filling in and we'll fill in the rest of the year. One major connection is the transition at the so-called Elizabethan period. The transition from Cortez to live nets, focusing on the fall crumb of Cervantes and Shakespeare. I'm currently doing that at the philosophic research society. The next transition is what was called the age of revolution, which will take the turn of the 17 hundreds to the 18 hundreds, the period of the French revolution, the period of Napoleon of Beethoven or Shelley garter.
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And that will be taken at the philosophic research society. April may in June of this year. The third transition is the one to our own time. That is from the 19th century to the 20th century. And that requires a matrix all of its own because the individuals in that matrix lead on a vector of revelation, which was only apparent in our own time, in that matrix, in that group and that lecture series, which will be July, August, and September of this year, I will take person was like Madame Blavatsky persons like nature, Schopenhauer, Strindberg, Epson, they individuals like [inaudible] who led to the 20th century, said Zion will, will take the major figures. Einstein. We will come into the 20th century late this year in the summer, but to compliment this forward movement because there's always wisdom. As we will see clerk Maxwell was quite aware of the fact, whenever anyone moves powerfully in one direction, you must also move comprehensively in the other direction.
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We may not step forward with impunity in terms of wholeness, without having also a sense of moving backwards. This is not simply a choreography applicable to Tai Chi movements. It's simply an understanding wisdom and experience and these dynamics. So as I move forward in that, I'm going to also on the Tuesday night series, move back in time, move back and large, uh, notions of duration. And we'll present the dark age series for six months and then we'll move further back in time and present they Alexandria and matrix. The first thousand years of Alexander take on one of the most fruitful areas in human history, probably more fruitful even than our own so far because the mind and spirit which we have today were foreign both East and West in that time period from 350 BC to roughly about 500 a day,
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That will be also a six month course. At the end of that series, I will bring the Thursday and Tuesday nights together in that I will focus the dynamic of the whole five years of effort on understanding the American tradition. And I will take again, they person to person history, but develop it in large. I will take a whole quarter on Benjamin Franklin a whole quarter on Thomas Jefferson, a whole quarter on Emerson, a whole quarter on William James, a whole quarter on John Dewey and a whole quarter on William Faulkner and try and bring the American tradition through
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Not as some other at dishing to the European aggregate, but as a cross section of the world of all time and all peoples moving progressively closer and closer to a disclosure of its universal nature. The problem we have in this country, which the Soviets do not understand is that we are not a European country. We are not a Christian country. We are in fact, a very strange inner penetration of all traditions and all countries. And therefore the Soviets do not see us at all. We are invisible to them just as they are misunderstood by us. And the tragedy of our time is that power politics on a global scale, you has played for the wrong reasons with players who do not understand what moves the other person make and what moves they will make in response. This condition of course, is a rather dangerous one, similar to someone gambling without knowing the rules of the game.
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All of this hopefully
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Will be of some use and have some value add as the conditions become more rounded that as, as the tape series and the lecture series come to some sense of closure along the end of 1986, I will try to trans pose what I can to print from it. I don't know how long that will take, but it's some effort that needs to be done. I didn't start this until I was more than 40 years of age and I kept hoping someone else would do it. No one else has done it. So I have shoulder the load simply by default out of default, which brings us to the 19th century. The 19th century, as we have seen
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Is a case
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In point, it is totally misunderstood, both East and West. Well that the major figures of the 19th century are quite different from what they're supposed to be. They are in fact illustrative of a dynamic line of
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Meaning, which
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When revealed discloses to us, a tragic posture of trying to grasp permanently the material world and measure it, codify it and have it, or to express it in some form which one could have and measure codify and have, or some artful expression or some literary expression assign some scientific expression that there must be some way in which man can tell himself a disc in a descriptive capacity, what this world is and have it, and be certain that he does have it. And that progressively in the 19th century, as this was undertaken time and again, by individual, after individual of genius in their genius and in their attempts, they found continuously successively Comlin Tivoli that it could not be done. And so the last figure in the series is a man who realized that his own time had lived through a tragic nightmare. And that waking up from it in the 20th century, man, would find that he was not only empty handed, but what little clothing he had been bequest by history was now in shreds and tatters.
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And he would have to go naked in the world all over again and learn all over again. And this psychological archetypal penetration of the return to the primitive condition is what powered the vision of art in the early part of the night century, that the return to the primitive is the only way by which we may verify that the cycle of frustration is over and some new beginnings can at least commence this deep seated need in the twenties, the century, as we will see produces incredible results. The return to nature, the return to the primordial will be glamorized with all the slurs and blurs of the mistakes and flaws of the past so that we may not even understand our repeat, but that's for another course tonight, we have James clerk Maxwell who was called clerk Maxwell. He was Scottish. I was born in Edinburgh, but 1831.
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His father bought a beautiful estate, rather the largest state in the South of Scotland, near a place called new Galloway. And, uh, it's in that, uh, section of Scotland, that's a sort of midway between Ireland and Edinburgh. It's a peninsula of Scotland that juts out into the Irish sea, above the isle of man. And, uh, it goes by the Scottish name of Kirkcudbright Cher Kirkcudbright. It is a kind of a barren landscape with a mountainous hilly Heather regions, and a lot of lakes. The young clerk Maxwell was moved there. Very young hadn't spent the first years of his life probably until he was eight or nine years old in the carefree countryside of Scotland and the fresh air, the cure water, and this condition made of clerk Maxwell, what it does for all little Scottish country boys, absolutely basic honest human being who relates to life in a straight forward, straight on regard, the kind of person who would require a clear water and, uh, unadulterated oatmeal for breakfast.
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This personality of clerk Maxwell was to stand him instead. And even though he lived only 48 years, he was to revolutionize science, to revolutionize mathematics and revolutionized the whole approach to mentality. There are other figures who contribute to this. We should in a more detailed and comprehensive matrix. Also take into consideration the man who came before him and the man who came after him, the man who came before him was Michael Faraday. The man who came after him was JJ Thompson, but at his clerk Maxwell, who is the fulcrum of the issue who personifies the exquisite results of a country, Scottish boy who looks straight into the universe and is fitted with a language, enabling him to describe exactly what he experiences, what he sees. He was entered into Cambridge. At first, he was entered in a matriculated to Peterhouse college in Cambridge, but very soon went over to Trinity college.
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And Trinity college was the great tradition of science and mathematics. It was the college of Isaac Newton. And in fact, a clerk Maxwell was compared to Isaac Newton. At least until Einstein came along, he was considered second only to Newton there at Trinity college, Cambridge Maxwell's great intellectual clarity stood him in great stead. And when he graduated in 1854, he was already a capable, competent individual. He had in fact, already written a number of papers which had been published. And one of them I'm concerned. They motion of double refraction in a viscous liquids under stress. That is to say, if you take a, um, a, a liquid in a volume and subject it to a stress along the line of, uh, stress, there will be a double fracturing. Each side of the, of the, um, stress will reflect a, uh, an occurrence. This balance appealed to clerk Maxwell.
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The fact that nature should disclose a cemetery in its, uh, got nature seemed absolutely right to the mind of cork Maxwell. And in fact, it began to penetrate to his imagination that perhaps the basic notion of what we called energy electricity would operate with the same cemetery, same forthrightness. He had made the acquaintance at Trinity college Cambridge with Michael Faraday whose great works were highly readable, probably because they were not couched in mathematical terms. Faraday was not a mathematician. And because he was not a mathematician, most of his scientific writings are in the form of notes and diaries journals series of experiments, which he would go a record at his observations. And it's these eight volumes of Faraday's experiments journals that formed the basis of Faraday's genius.
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But it's apparent in reading through Farrah day that his accumulated experience in the world, in the physics of electricity and magnetism and the world of force and energy, we're not tied into the expressive, exact precise world of science because they were not mathematically expressed. The young mathematical genius cork Maxwell began to take it upon himself to translate Farrah DEI into mathematics. That is to say he first thought of himself as a translator, a Confucius of science, not someone who was pioneering something new, but someone who was conserving the past by bringing the best elements together into a series order and form and translating it into a compatible language, into a pattern of expression that would key in to tie into the world of applicability because mathematics is the applicable world. Math from mathematics science becomes technology through the language of mathematics science in its experimental phase transmutes and becomes technology in its structural phase. And if the 20th century is anything at all is a technological fantasy. So we have to understand clerk Maxwell because he's very important in this whole progression of how this fantasy came to be. He was appointed very soon after coming out of Cambridge with his degree to a little college in Aberdeen, Maurice shell
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College. Okay.
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Yeah. And for four years he held this post as a professor there, he, uh, in fact, uh, seemed to settle down. He liked, uh, the home life very much. He thought to himself that the best thing that he could do would be to teach decently and live decently. He married, he married a woman named Mary Duar, like the Duarte scotch, who was the daughter of the principal of Marichelle college. He had inherited the estate named Glen heir. It seemed to him that life was very satisfying, very direct. He had no more druthers, but four years went by and in 1860, the university of Aberdeen was founded. Marchelle college was folded into the structure and clerk Maxwell was left out. He applied at Edinburgh and was turned down,
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But
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He was accepted at the university of London. It's one of those events that in retrospect, we think to ourselves, some divine wise hand has planned all this because London was the perfect place for clerk Maxwell.
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And for eight years in the eighties,
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1860s from 1860 day, 1868,
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That is in
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The period when the civil war was ravaging, the United States
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In England,
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In London, in the mind of cork Maxwell, the modern scientific world was being formed. That is to say that clerk Maxwell's direct Scottish bright eyed mind was structuring out a world view that would eventually obtain and become the world order in the 20th century with some implementations, all this was happening while the civil war was going on by 1868 clerk Maxwell's capacity to understand electricity and magnetism had balloon to proportions that were unheard of. That is to say he had found himself in a capacity of synthesis. We're in the synthesis had to transcended completely all of the implications that had been thought possible previously. So he retired, he went back to Glen air with his wife and he devoted all of his time to writing. And what he wrote there was his great treatise on electricity and magnetism, which would be published in 1873 in two volumes.
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That is the first edition would be, but while he was there while he was working on this great monumental work, this classic of the new age, he was gaining fame throughout Europe and especially throughout England for the brilliancy of his mathematical mind of his capacity to order large structures of endeavor. And so the, uh, university of Cambridge sent for him in 1871, they were going to set up a new laboratory. It was to be built with all the latest equipment. It was to have, uh, a large endowment in terms of funds, in terms of staffing, it was to commemorate a physicist, a British business named Henry Cavendish who had died in 1810. He'd lived from 1731 about a hundred years before Maxwell died in 1810. And Kevin dish was extremely famous. His estate and a number of friends had left considerable funds. And by this time 1871 had matured.
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And so they brought clerk Maxwell to Cambridge to design and set up the Cavendish laboratory, which would become the alchemical crucible in which modern physics would be born. There were only eight years remaining to clerk Maxwell's life, but he applied himself. He set up and structured the Cavendish live, uh, laboratory its library and staff it's functioning with the incredible genius of his mind. He made the Cavendish laboratory, the first real instrument for high level physics. And it was done all in the 1870, all of the labs that we find in the 20th century, the reason research capacity, the energizing of design and intent, the arrangement of investigative personnel and equipment and the dovetailing of all these facilities together.
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Oh, a great deal to clerk Maxwell. Yeah. My own sense of design of what an education would be has largely been formulated through acquaintance with this kind of a structuring technique. He made the Cavendish laboratory, the most outstanding area of research in thought in the 19th century, the man who would become the director of the cabin dish at the end of the 19th century into the 20th would be the great physicist JJ Thompson, who finally took electricity and magnetism and the experimental science of the laboratory completely into the 20th century. It became the prototype of the kind of laboratories. Well, there's an example. The laboratory that open Heimer set up to develop the atomic bomb was based in its structure and intent personnel and equipment on this kind of a design. So that cork Maxwell's mine made and shaped an investigating tool, which was a high energy physics lab where the mathematical work could be keyed into the experimental work and where the interplay of minds and equipment processes of discovery and recovery of publishing.
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In retrospect, all could be brought into a wholesome mixture where I could influence each other and produce the kind of quality manifestation that is needed for the human mind to penetrate through the mysteries of matter. The external phenomenon was the laboratory. The internal phenomenon was the treatise on electricity and magnetism. It is a thousand pages. It is largely mathematical. It is filled with complex equations Einstein when he wrote the evolution of physics from early concepts to relativity and quantum with his friend Leopold infield writes in here under the chapter field relativity field comma relativity during the second half of the 19th century, new and revolutionary ideas were introduced into physics. They opened the way to a new philosophical view, differing from the mechanical one, the results of the work of Farrah day Maxwell in Hertz led to the development of modern physics, to the creation of new concepts, forming a new picture of reality.
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And he will want to discuss in here the development of Maxwell's part. And he will say here that one of the most important developments, which occurred first in the mind to fair day, but was unusable in the way in which fair expressed it. So that max will understanding its primordial utility translated it into the usable form of mathematics. The notion in Faraday's mind was that we have got to stop looking at the world as things we have got to stop thinking of electric, Chris G and magnetism as movements of things that in fact, the only way to understand the phenomena of electricity and magnetism and even gravity at all, the basic powers of the universe is to conceive of them as fields.
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And that when we conceive of them as field phenomenon, we then have the right mentality to address ourselves intelligently to the phenomenon. The problem with Farah day is that he could not detail this into a mathematical language so that it could be translated into action. It couldn't be dealt with his clerk Maxwell who took this field notion and honed it sharp so that it became an implement and carved out the technological world. Um, let me shift over here to a book called the evolution of scientific thought from Newton to Einstein by [inaudible] published in Dover paperbacks and on page 126, we've find DABRA finally getting around to Maxwell. He writes in here.
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Yeah. Faraday was the first scientist to realize the enormous importance of the electromagnetic field. He saw in it, a reality of a new category differing from matter, he was capable of transmitting affects from place. It was capable of transmitting effects from place to place and was not to be likened to a mirror mathematical fiction such as the gravitational field was then to be assumed. Now at that time, most of the work that was being done in physics in mathematics assumed a principle of action at a distance that the efficacy of force and energy resided within things and moved from thing to thing. But Farrah day through his experiments had conceived of the idea that it, the reality of energy resided, not in things, but in a field, he used the term ether. He couldn't find the right term. And so he used the term ether rather like a Midwestern Housewives using the term Dao in the 20th century, it meant a vague something or other. You couldn't really think of it. This ether Faraday decided must carry an Empress through itself like a wave. And that this is the way in which electromagnetic energy is transmitted through the universe, but that the carrying medium was the ultimate contradiction. It could receive impressions of fantastic force and yet was seemingly nothing material in itself. What could this be? Couldn't understand. It seemed to him a mystery.
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In other words, according to Farah day, when a current was flowing along a wire, the most important aspect of the phenomenon lay, not in the current itself, but in the fields of electric and magnetic forest distributed throughout space in the current vicinity, don't look at the wire, but also don't look at the current in the wire conceive. Instead they are averse the negative of things, the field of current generated by the current, the field of force around it, that it has the shaping power in this elevation of the field to a position of preeminence. It is often called the pure physics of it.
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The field or field physics Maxwell
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Took this notion from Farah day fair. They gave it to him, new, new Maxwell Maxwell, toyed with this. And intwine with this in addressing himself to the field. He realized that just as he had dealt with cemetery
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And
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He had dealt with symmetry and the,
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Um, hearing of, uh,
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Uh, this, uh, liquid. And this is true in solids too, that there is a symmetry of the lines of a forest that developed that the same principle would have to affect itself in terms of the energy field in the universe. That is the day when he was developed
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The mathematical equation E yes, for the energy H is for magnetism in the first equation. There, there are two equations for electricity, and there are two equations for, um, magnetics attempted to give you the derivation of these terms is natural does at the very beginning of his book, but I'll, I'll come back to that. Let's stick with the equations. The first equation has a little mathematical notation div, and it simply indicates a mathematical arrangement, a statement that, uh, D I V E equals zero. But this condition of let this condition of electricity equals zero. The next function is called a curl. The curl of the electricity equals. And this is where the equation becomes a little iffy since we don't have a Blackboard, but let me give it to you again. It's in doubt, bro, page one 26, curl the curl function of electricity equals minus one, oversea and D H over D T T being time C being a velocity.
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This the equation when it came to magnetism had been assumed by Farrah day to just apply to electricity. But Maxwell sense of symmetry made him write the same kind of equation for magnetism so that he then had two sets of equations. And in these equations, one more operation was applied, which brought an apparent revelation to Maxwell's mind that electricity and magnetism were for all intents and purposes, a polar energies. They converted into each other that a magnetic field will create electricity, but an electric field will create magnetism, but they are related. And the way in which they're related in the equations has to do with the three fundamental aspects of what used to be called matter. And now we're being transposed into relational phenomenon of a field form, the three basic factors being length, time and mass. And in fact, now we have to go to Maxwell's book.
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I don't want to get too far field from what you can go to. This is a Dover edition Maxwell in his enormous treaties, gives us a 30 page preliminary. And in this preliminary, he gives us all that we need to know to understand the shift of frame of reference, which he is endeavoring to bring into manifestation by writing this book. He at the very beginning and the preface tells us, uh, some interesting little points that we've all forgotten, that the word electric electron and grape refers to Amber, because it was the experiments with Amber that first produced the phenomenon of electricity. So electron just mean is the Greek word for Amber? That is, it takes place because of the maneuvering of this element. Magnetic comes from the Greek word magnates because they lodestone was found in a section of Greece, uh, and tessellate, uh, Fastly magnesia.
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So it was called so magnetism and electricity and words come from the grape, which relate to the things in which they were first found. This is a, this is characteristic of Maxwell's great comprehension that he takes everything back to the beginning. He follows the mathematician's pension to find some court system and to establish the origin of the coordinate system so that whenever he establishes any point in an argument, he can connect any point in the argument with the origin of the coordinate system and thereby given when asked at any time, a meaningful line of development between every single iota of the argument and the conditions, the intellectual structure under which it occurs. This is new. This is a revolution in thought, this is an unbelievably capable individual. Now this had been done in absolute terms by the geniuses yoga life potentially, or the geniuses of mystical insight like Titus, but had never been done in terms of a reductive language of applicability that could come back to the world of material and express it exactly in this term. So that Maxwell's thought here is extremely sophisticated, making possible accuracy of conception, which in one generation would produce, uh, the theory of relativity. But the accuracy of this mentality is so difficult to entertain is it is like trying to stand on tip toes and then realizing that one's toes have nothing to do with one's height. I have to give you a little vignette here. There was a mathematician, an Irishman from Dublin about this time.
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And, uh, his name in fact is, um, um, Hamilton, William Rolen Hamilton. He had become an extremely, uh, capable, uh, mathematician, but he had set himself, uh, an incredible problem. He had taken up the issue of trying to understand three dimensional space in terms of equations. He had solved most of the basic expressive problems that were in terms of area two dimensional space planes, where you have to have a special kind of a mathematic that brings in imaginary numbers. It's expressed a plus BI I being an imaginary number. That is where there's a set, a parallel set of two numbers. So that any point or any expression in the equations actually is made up of two parallel locations at the same time, it's like applying double vision to an intellectual conception. You can't think of any one thing, but you have to think in terms of pairs constantly and accurately and keep them parallel and straight all the time. Now, the way to do this is through the mathematics of this, uh, plane, this kind of algebra algebraic, a formulation, which then keyed into calculus.
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When it came to three dimensional space, there was a problem. Equations would solve. Nothing would happen. Hamilton tried using the very sophisticated three triplets and nothing would happen. You couldn't solve anything. He was hung up for years. And one day he was walking long, the grand canal in Dublin, and it hit him all of a sudden and Hamilton. So distracted. He ran to one of the posts of bronc bridge and carved the equations in the post of the bridge. And they're still there in Dublin. He realized that when you deal with three dimensional space, you can't deal with it in terms of triplets, but you have to have fours. You have to have four numbers. You have to have four expressions for every point in three-dimensional space. The reason being is that the whole plane shifts in three dimensional space. So you'd have to have coordinates to describe the one plane.
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And then you have to have another pair to describe the plane within the other dimension. So this discovery by Hamilton, this is 1843, did two things. It freed up mathematics, trunk it shackling to the old arithmetic common sense flaw. One of the first things that had to be given up was the commuter two laws of multiplication that isn't been assumed since time immemorial that a times B is the same as B, times a is not true in three dimensional space is not necessarily true. And rarely is exactly true that the community laws of multiplication had to be given up Harding up. But the fact was is that the mentality involved in sustaining a mathematical analysis of this complexity Hamilton's, uh, uh, quadrillions, uh, were, were phenomenally difficult. The expression in fact was so long and so cumbersome that it was used only by the real intellectual elite until a man named Jay Willard Gibbs came along and simplified the whole process.
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And it was from Gibbs that we have vector analysis, but this mentality meant that there were certain persons freed up finally to envision cubes. One could deal in equations confidently. Exactly precisely not only with squares C squared, the one could deal with cubes C cube, then on a three dimensional level with a three dimensional model available for exacting mathematical analysis. When you take a look at a field phenomena, you can find me make sense of it in terms of the mathematical language, which you're seeking to speak to, right. Even go to the Blackboard and you can with quite a certainty. Describe what it is that you are say, but Maxwell to whom all kudos, because he is the one that put all this in operation. But Maxwell was the one who then delivered the message. We have three basic measurements available to us. For reality, we have length. We have mass. We have time
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That in framing any mathematical system that is going to be descriptively accurate, then we have to be rigorous in terms of these three measurements, these three quantities at the very first page, the first paragraph of his treaties, he writes every expression of a quantity consists of two factors or components. One of these is the name of a certain known quantity of the same kind as the quantity to be expressed, which is taken as a standard of reference. The other component is the number of times the standard is to be taken in order to make up the required quantity. The standard quantity is technically called the unit and the number is called the numerical value of the quantity. And now all of our direction is going to shift away from your miracle value to the unit because the unit must be dependable. And the unit can only be thought of in terms of the highest rigorousness.
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Now we're dealing with a three-dimensional model now, because we've got these three elements that are, that are in it. These are what are, these are what were called the dimensions. He says in all scientific studies, hence it is of the greatest importance to employ units belonging, to a properly defined system. And to know the relations of these units, to the fundamental units, so that we may be able at once to transform our results from one system to another. In other words, in order to have a technology, we have to have this, um, mathematical trans mutational fulcrum. And it has to be exact because we're going to be required to read out from our mathematical thought structure in terms of calling out the tooling to the phenomenal world and reshaping. The first is like the first of the three fundamental units and all three have to be entered to find so that they form a unity.
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He talks about length. He talks about how a foot does this and that, you know how in astronomy, there's a distance between the earth and the sun and so forth. But then he says in the present state of science, the most universal standard of length, which we could assume would be the wavelength in vacuum of a particular kind of light emitted by some widely diffused substance, such as sodium, which has well-defined lines and its spectrum such a standard would be independent of any changes in the dimension of the earth. And it should be adopted by those who expect their writings to be more permanent than that body. Maxwell's little Scottish sense of humor saying that we're dealing with something that is now no longer colloquial in any sense of the term, but universal in every sense of the term, one of the basic constituents elements of the universe sodium, and it's, uh, the wavelength in a vacuum of a particular kind of light emitted from it, uh, will be our sense of light.
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Then you can, uh, denote this. He says, you could use L now and it will have a meaningfulness and exactness, but what about time? He talks about how the standard unit of time around countries is always a rotation of the earth and its axis so forth. And that the unit of time adopted in all physical resource searches is usually one second to mean seller time. But he says here in astronomy a year are sometimes used as a unit of time, but a more universal unit of time might be found by taking the periodic time of vibration of the particular kind of light whose wavelength is a unit of length. In other words, we're going to take now for time the vibration, the periodic time of vibration of that particular kind of light whose wavelength was the unit of length light comes out in the wavelength.
(00:57:11):
So the length of that wave is our length by that occurs in a period of Essity. And the period is see now, as I was sensitive time to they're related, third is mass, and he talks about the pound and how 7,000 grains make a pound. And he says that these whites for the pounder in London, and he talks about a different kind of a metric measurement and how the standards for this are Paris. And he says, Oh, we need a different mass. We need a different understanding. He says the accuracy with which the masses of bodies can be compared by wing is far greater than that his or too attained in the measurement of lengths. So that all masses are if possible, to be compared directly with the standard and not to do from experiments on water. So he says, we will denote in descriptive astronomy, the mass of the sun or that of the earth is sometimes taken as a unit.
(00:58:14):
But in the dynamical theory of astronomy, the unit of mass is deduced in the units of time and length combined with the fact of universal gravitation, the astronomical unit of mass is that mass, which attracts another body placed at the unit of distance. So as to produce in that body, a unit of acceleration so that we now have in mass bound up in it already intrinsic with it, the notion of acceleration, the notion of length, the notion of periodicity in time, the just the description of this is all bound up together in these equations. Once we have these three link time and mass in this arrangement, we may then derive all the rest of the phenomenon that we needed to deal with in the first derived unit that Maxwell had was velocity. And of course, because he was dealing with a length of light, uh, from sodium and because he was dealing with the periodicity of his vibration for time, and then mass can bounded from those, the first derived unit velocity read out, of course, in terms of light, that is true.
(00:59:48):
One of the quandaries, which modern physics finds itself in was built into and conundrum in the first place, in the whole structure of thought that made this, uh, available, expressive, they all the other derived units and I'll skip over them. I don't want to tell you on this, but Maxwell was proceeding rather like Euclid proceeded with his geometry, moving from step to step, leaving nothing out, assiduously covering every aspect. Or there were sections in the, all this is preliminary. There were sections on physical continuity and discontinuity. There were sections on discontinuity of a function of more than one variable. There were periodic and multiple functions, the relation of physical quantities to directions in space. And then he came to intestines, intensities, and fluxes, and all the time he's distinguishing, he is saying we have two distinct ways of looking at phenomenon. We can see them in terms of what used to be called, uh, from object to object, this influence where there was a line of development, a line of force, or we can see them in terms of the field, which encompasses the objects.
(01:01:30):
In which case, we're looking at something called, uh, a field. And in order to understand the field phenomenon, we need a cross section of the field, which is in, um, area, a square phenomena, such and such case square. Or if we want to get into a three-dimensional cross-section, we can use some kind of a cube KQ so that we have two distinct ways of looking at reality. We may look at it in terms of some kind of a line development or in some kind of an area development. That is the key to understanding the one has to move in terms of line and the key and the other is to understand a passage of energy through a certain area or a certain volume. And that either way, we enjoy a capacity to then measure the effects of force and phenomenon in the universe and coordinate all of our experiments together into this one master language.
(01:02:51):
And what's this transformative three dimensional capacity. We can then translate that accumulated understanding into a technical application in the world. So the man who designed the Cavendish laboratory was also designing the intellectual room, the mental space where modern physics would be born. This is one of the great, great events of all time that this could, that this could actually happen. He goes into the different kinds of inner goals, line integrals. He goes into potentials and he talks about how all the various, uh, uh, uh, great discoveries that had been discounted before not understood how he's bringing them all back together. Uh, a man named, uh, green had done an essay that had been neglected by mathematicians, just, uh, discoveries by Gauss on the continent and so forth that in fact, all of this would be brought together in this traders. And then he takes us after the preliminary into part one, which is electro stakes.
(01:04:19):
And he takes us back to experiment after this preliminary, where he started from just the very basics and developed a whole algebra, a whole geometry of expression. The first part of the book takes us back to experiment. One, let a piece of glass and a piece of resin, neither of which exhibits any electrical properties, be rubbed together and left with the rubber surfaces in contact. They will still exhibit no electrical properties, let them be separated. They will not attract each other. So that Maxwell is following his plan all over again. But what he has described on sort of the structural sub-basement foundational level in the preliminary, he now will go through that whole structure rigorously in terms of co-leading all of the experiments up to his own time, bringing all of them together just as a master mathematician will bring all the various elements that are needed for a full equation and bring them into his, uh, equation.
(01:05:37):
Maxwell will proceed over the next thousand pages to bring all of the basic experiments that have actually been done and all the basic mathematical insight that has already been done. But what has not been done is the correlation of all of them together in one master pattern. And when he did that, it finally stood as one of those great achievements that for all time, other men can use, even though it went through a revised second edition after his death, a couple of years later, uh, Maxwell had rewritten the first nine chapters of a treatise on electricity and magnetism died at age 48 and 1879 Cambridge and his fellow workers brought the revised nine chapters, uh, on the rest of, uh, of the work in the reprint, brought it out in 1891, JJ Thompson, the great director of the Cavendish laboratory brought out a third edition in which, uh, some basic, uh, footnotes were put in trying to bring everything up current, but there was so much that had become fruitful because of Maxwell by 1891, that he brought out a supplemental volume, the third volume, which Dover did not reprint.
(01:07:05):
Unfortunately I have to find a copy, uh, from the 1891 printing of it. It was that third edition of the triggers that electricity and magnetism with the JJ Thompson, a third volume that Einstein read that everybody was reading. And there were all the physics because what had been done for them is that this great laboratory of the mind with its expressive capacity to translate into actual three-dimensional mathematical, uh, mentality, the correlation of all the experiments and all the thoughts that had been done up until that time, and then gave a trans meditative way of applying that to the physical world so that an ecology of mind and world was set in motion where the rigorous application of man's certainty of measurement was not so much applied to the world, but applied to his because the veracity of the higher mathematics of nuclear physics is applicable because we have a mental control upon it. It is our yoga. It is the yoga that technology is based upon that. If we order our minds in this way and can measure the world through this area. So described as volumes so described in our minds, then we can order the world in accordance with it such as the tragic flaw that 20th century man labors under daily.
(01:08:59):
Well,
(01:09:01):
Next week, we'll see some man, well, may not have been able to read Knoxville's book, but who received the message in the fullness of the spirit, Leo Tolstoy, who was the master spirit as a whole century with that, we'll close out the series and this lecturing here, turn the place over into the capitalists.
(01:09:31):
Okay.

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