Lecture #4 Notes: Electromagnetism

Benjamin Franklin – Tamer of Zeus due to his ability to harness lightening with the use of the lightening rod. A book is out with the appropriate title, "Stealing God's Thunder."

In current mainstream physics, a Theory of Everything would unify all the fundamental interactions of nature, which are usually considered to be four in number: gravity, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and the electromagnetic force. The expected pattern of theories is:

Theory of Everything

Gravity

Electronuclear force (GUT)

Color force

Electroweak force

Strong force

Weak force

Electromagnetism

Electric force

Magnetic force

Michael Faraday – (p.80) Universe on a T-Shirt, “When Faraday was born; messages traveled no faster than horses or ships could carry them; by the time of his death, information could be sent across continents and oceans as fast as it could be typed or read. Electromagnetism as a science did not exist before 1820; by the end of the century it had changed the face of the world.”

Electricity – is a general term for a variety of phenomena resulting from the presence and flow of electric charge

The Electromagnetic Spectrum

Van Allen Radiation Belts

The inner ring is 3000km from earth

The outer ring is 15000km from earth

In spite of the earth’s protective magnetic field, many cosmic rays reach the earth’s surface. It is greatest at the poles because the particles do not travel across the magnetic field lines, but along the field lines and are not deflected. This creates the aurora borealis lighting in the sky caused by charged particles in the Van Allen belts striking atmospheric molecules.

Anti-matter:
First created in 1990 and has since been confirmed in it’s creation by multiple accelerators. Antimatter is currently the most valuable substance in existence, with an estimated worth of $300 billion per milligram. This is because production is difficult (only a few atoms are produced in reactions in particle accelerators) and because there is higher demand for the other uses of particle accelerators.