Are Numbers Real? by Brian Clegg

Author:Brian Clegg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

To a modern physicist these equations are straightforward, bread-and-butter stuff (though most would admire their sophistication). But at the time he produced his original version, Maxwell’s ability to model with mathematics alone was considered daunting by most scientists. William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, a significant contemporary of Maxwell’s who had become a physics professor at an even younger age, was among many who struggled to deal with this degree of abstraction. It didn’t help that no one had seen electromagnetic waves other than light, yet the theory suggested that such waves should be generated simply by sending an electrical charge up and down a piece of metal (an aerial as we now call it). It was a good twenty years before Heinrich Hertz produced the first radio waves this way, helping to make Maxwell’s remarkable achievement a solid success.

Although mathematics had made Maxwell’s work possible, at this stage even he was not prepared to take on all the implications that came out of the formulas. He might have modeled with mathematics, but he wasn’t assuming that the numbers were a direct basis for the nature of reality. In two separate ways, Maxwell was prepared to turn a blind eye to what the numbers said. One was in making an assumption—the other in simply ignoring one of the predictions that came out of the equations, because it seemed too strange.

The assumption was about the ether. Maxwell’s electromagnetic waves depended on empty space being able to sustain electrical and magnetic fields—and it was those fields that supported the waves. There was no need for a medium for the waves to travel through. In fact, as mentioned above, had there been such a medium that behaved like an ordinary physical material, the waves would be odd indeed, because transverse waves that wiggle from side to side can’t travel through the middle of a medium, as the medium would damp down the side-to-side oscillation. Usually such waves travel on an edge—say on the surface of water, or in the side-to-side vibration of a violin string. When waves travel through a medium, like sound through air, they tend to be compression waves, wiggling in the direction of travel.

However, despite his model clearly predicting that there was no need for the ether so that light could travel through empty space from the stars, Maxwell resolutely stuck to his assumption that the ether must exist. All good scientists are a mix of iconoclast and traditionalist. They need to bring fresh new ideas, replacing old ones, but at the same time they can’t start from scratch with everything. They need to build on existing concepts. And all too often, those concepts last long past their sell-by date, as happened with the ether. Interestingly some modern physicists, like the Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek, think that in a sense the ether does still exist—as long as we are prepared to consider the existence of the various fields, like the electromagnetic field, that mathematically fill space as a new way of looking at the concept of an ether.

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