Tag Archives: Quantum leaps

Arts, History, Science, United States

Quantum Leaps: Benjamin Franklin

1706 – 1790

Benjamin Franklin was one of the five men who drafted the Declaration of Independence of 1776. He was also a prolific scientist.

Benjamin Franklin had a rare genius. Unlike most of the scientists chronicled on this site who were known for their outstanding talents and contributions to science, the American Franklin was brilliant in a wide range of arenas. In a five-year period between 1747 and 1752, he contributed more to science than most scientists would achieve in a lifetime of dedicated study. Yet, during other periods of his life, he operated in, and conquered, completely different fields. He was a master printer and publisher, a successful journalist and satirist, an inventor, a world-famous ambassador and, probably most notably of all, a politician at a vital time in American history. Indeed, Franklin was one of the five separate signatories of the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain in 1776 and was a key participant in the later drafting of the American Constitution.

. Studying Electricity

Franklin does, however, merit an entirely separate entry for his achievements in physics alone – he was a pioneer in understanding the properties and potential benefits of electricity. Although the phenomenon of electricity had been noted since the time of the ancients, very little was known about it from a scientific perspective, and many considered the extent of its usefulness to be limited to ‘magic’ tricks. At around the age of forty, Franklin became fascinated by electricity and began to experiment with it, quickly realising it was a subject worthy of scientific study and research in its own right. So, he sold his printing interests and dedicated himself for the next five years to understanding it.

. Flying a Kite

Although Franklin wrongly believed electricity was a single ‘fluid’ (this was an advance on earlier theories which posited the idea of two different fluids), he perceived this fluid to somehow consist of moving particles, now understood to be electrons. More importantly, he undertook important studies involving electrical charge and introduced the terms ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ in explaining the way substances could be attracted to or repelled by each other according to the nature of their charge. He also believed these charges ultimately cancelled each other out so that if something lost electrical charge, another substance would instantly gain the amount being cast away. His work on electricity reached its peak in his now famous kite experiment of 1752. Believing lightning to be a form of electricity, and in order to prove it, Franklin launched a kite into a thunderstorm on a long piece of conducting string. Tying the end of the string to a capacitor, he was vindicated when lightning did indeed charge it, proving the existence of its electrical properties. From these results and realising the potential of a device that could deflect the harmful effects of lightning strikes away from buildings and property, he developed the lightning conductor.

Franklin had also published his text Experiments and Observations on Electricity, made at Philadelphia in America in 1751, which went on to inspire future scientists in the study and development of the uses of electricity.

. A Prolific Inventor

From 1753 the time Franklin dedicated to science reduced dramatically due to his taking up a new post as deputy postmaster general and, later, political and ambassadorial roles. He did, however, leave a legacy of other inventions from the wide range of experiments conducted throughout his life, including: an iron furnace ‘Franklin’ stove (still in use today), bifocal spectacles, the street lamp, the rocking chair, the harmonica, an odometer and watertight bulkheads for ships. Franklin also came up with the idea of Daylight Saving Time and was the first to charter the Gulf Stream from observations made by sailors.

A man of many talents, Benjamin Franklin was a successful inventor, politician, printer, oceanographer, ambassador, journalist and, of course, scientist.

. The Legacy of Benjamin Franklin

Franklin’s legacy, in addition to the many inventions such as lightning conductors, bifocal lenses and street lamps, was one of learning. He established one of the first public libraries, as well as one of the first universities: Pennsylvania, in America.

On a broader societal level, he established the modern postal system, set up police and fire fighting departments and established the Democratic Party.

He certainly lived up to his own quotation, ‘If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.’

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Arts, History, Science

Quantum Leaps: Sir Isaac Newton

1642 – 1727

So many extensive books and articles have been written on the life and impact of Sir Isaac Newton over the last three centuries it is impossible to do his achievements justice in a short entry like this. He is quite simply one of the greatest scientists of all time.

. A Slow Beginning

His early years did not necessarily suggest, however, he would end up as such. Born and bred in the quiet village of Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire, England, and schooled in the nearby town of Grantham, he was not particularly noted for academic achievements as a child. Even on entry to Trinity College, Cambridge, he did not stand out until, ironically, the University was forced to close during the period 1665-1666 due to the high risk of plague. Newton returned to Woolsthorpe and began two years of remarkable contemplation on the laws of nature and mathematics which would transform the history of human knowledge. Although he published nothing during this period, he formulated and tested many of the scientific principles which would become the basis for his future achievements.

However, it would often be decades before he returned to his earlier discoveries. For example, his ideas on universal gravitation did not re-emerge until he began a controversial correspondence on the subject with Robert Hooke in around 1680. Furthermore, it was not until Edmond Halley challenged Newton in 1684 to find out how planets could have the elliptical orbits described by Johannes Kepler, and Newton replied he already knew, that he fully articulated his law of gravitation. Yet he had begun work on the subject back in the 1660s in Woolsthorpe after famously seeing an apple fall from a tree and wondering if the force which propelled it towards the earth could be applied elsewhere in the universe.

Following his declaration to Halley, Newton was forced to recalculate his proof having lost his original jottings, and the result was published in Newton’s most famous work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687). This law of gravitation proposed that all matter attracts other matter with a force related to the combination of their masses, but this attraction is weakened with distance, indeed, in inverse proportion to the square of their distances apart. This universal principle applied just as equally to the relationship between two small particles on earth as it did between the sun and the planets, and Newton was able to use it to explain Kepler’s elliptical orbits.

. Newton’s Laws of Motion

In the same work, Newton built on earlier observations made by Galileo and expressed three laws of motion which have been at the heart of modern physics ever since. The ‘law of inertia’, states that an object at rest or in motion in a straight line at a constant speed will carry on in the same state until it meets another force. The second stated that a force could change the motion of an object according to the product of its masses and its acceleration, vital in understanding dynamics. The third declares that the force or action with which an object meets another object is met by an equal force or reaction.

Aside from the wide-ranging uses for the laws Newton outlined in the Principia, the important point is that all historical speculation of different mechanical principles for the earth from the rest of the cosmos were cast aside in favour of a single, universal system. It was clear that simple mathematical laws could explain a huge range of seemingly disconnected physical facts, providing science with the straightforward explanations it had been seeking since the time of the ancients. Newton’s insistence on the use of mathematical expression of physical occurrences also underlined the standard for modern physics to follow.

. Further Achievements

Newton achieved major breakthroughs in other areas too. His proof that white light was made up of all the colours of the spectrum was outlined in his 1672 work New Theory about Light and Colours. In Opticks (1704), he also articulated his influential (if partially inaccurate) particle or corpuscle theory of light.

Another achievement significant to mathematics was his invention of the ‘binomial theorem’.

Newton had a practical side too, inventing the reflecting telescope in the 1660s. This new instrument bypassed the focusing problems caused by chromatic aberration in the refracting telescope of the type Galileo had created.

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Arts, Science

Quantum Leaps: Michael Faraday

MICHAEL FARADAY (1791–1867)

Michael Faraday FRS, an English scientist, contributed to the scientific study of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. His main discoveries include the principles underlying electromagnetic induction, electrolysis and rotation. He was also the first to have discovered liquified chlorine.

Regarded as one of the great experimental scientists of all time. Even Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955) considered him to be one of the most important influences in the history of physical science. Yet the man whose discoveries and inventions, amongst them the electric motor, electric generator and the transformer, were to have such a profound impact on modern life, might not have entered the scientific arena at all but for certain fortuitous events in his youth. The first was his apprenticeship at a bookbinder’s when he was thirteen. Here his interest in science – and, in particular electricity – was stimulated upon reading pages from the books he was asked to bind.

Another fortunate incident was his appointment as assistant to the renowned chemist Sir Humphrey Davy (1778 – 1829), who had remembered the young Faraday attending his lectures. The temporary post soon turned permanent and shortly afterwards Davy took Faraday with him on a grand European tour which gave the young man the rare opportunity to meet and learn from many of the leading physicists and chemists of the day.

Much of Faraday’s early work as a scientist in the 1820s was not in physics, the area which ultimately led to his breakthrough inventions, but in chemistry. In 1823, he became the first person to liquify chlorine, albeit accidentally, while he was conducting another experiment. He quickly deduced how the new form of chlorine had been obtained and applied the process, which made use of pressure and cooling, to other gases. By employing his talent as an outstanding analyst of his own chemical experiments, he also went on to discover benzene in 1825.

. The Electric Motor

Yet it is physical science, in particular his work involving electricity, for which Faraday is best remembered today. As early as 1821, he was able to create the first electric motor after discovering electromagnetic rotation. He had developed Hans Christian Oersted’s (1777 – 1851) 1820 discovery that electric current could deflect a magnetic compass needle. Faraday’s experiment proved that a wire carrying an electric current would rotate around a fixed magnet and that conversely, the magnet would revolve around the wire if the experiment were reversed. From this work, Faraday became convinced that electricity could be produced by some kind of magnetic movement alone but it took a further ten years before he successfully proved his hypothesis.

In 1831, by rotating a copper disk between the poles of a magnet, Faraday was able to produce a steady electric current. This discovery allowed him to go on to produce electrical generators, the transformer (also invented independently at around the same time by an American, Joseph Henry) and even the dynamo: inventions which can truly be claimed to have changed the world.

. Electrical Fields

The reason Faraday was able to make such advances was because from early in his career he had rejected the concept of electricity as a ‘fluid’, an idea that had been accepted up until that time, and instead visualised its ‘fields’ with lines of force at their edges. He believed that magnetism was also induced by fields of force and that it could interrelate with electricity because the respective fields cut across each other. Proving this to be true by producing an electric current via magnetism, Faraday had discovered electromagnetic induction. He was encouraged by this and went on to explore the idea that all natural forces were somehow ‘united’.

He then focused on how light and gravity were related to electromagnetism. In turn, this led to the discovery of the ‘Faraday effect’ in 1845 which proved that polarised light could be affected by a magnet. James Clerk Maxwell proved that light was indeed a form of electromagnetic radiation, and eventually provided the mathematical expression for Faraday’s law of induction.

. The Laws of Electrolysis

Faraday’s fascination with electricity and his background in chemistry both found a natural expression in electrolysis, in which he was able to perform ground-breaking work.

In 1833, he was the first to state the basic laws of electrolysis, namely that: (1) during electrolysis the amount of substance produced at an electrode is proportional to the quantity of electricity used, and (2) the quantities of different substances left on the cathode or anode by the same amount of electricity are proportional to their equivalent weights.

Science Book

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