CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@FishFace Maxwell was trying to fit a periodic "pattern" that simultaneously satisfies some "constraints". These constraints are the "laws" based on some experiments that are not about nature, but about some artificial setups created by Faraday and others. They used copper wires that have certain properties in conductivity and permeability. If these people had used iron wires instead, their equations would be more complicated. Maxwell could not derive solutions for his PDE.

Why did #Maxwell and #Einstein use a bunch of equations from Faraday, Ampere, Ohm, .. that are non-universal and material dependent to generate a set of supposedly universal laws? They perhaps never actually read the experimental results in which copper wires were replaced by iron wires. Most, if not all, of these results were not published as formal theories, but were documented by many experimental physicists.

Here are the references of these historical documents.

#physics #AI #copilot