Maxwell's Equations Were Discovered [video] | Hacker News Reader

Maxwell's Equations Were Discovered [video]

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58 pointssurprisetalk23 comments

Video title is How Maxwell's Equations Were Discovered, HN's regex thingy changed it to Maxwell's Equations Were Discovered. (My brain's regex changed it back :)

Isn't it about time HN replaced the regex by AI?

Removing how is stupid. If the "extraneous" how is there, you can still understand it, but when the necessary how is removed, it doesn't make sense or it changes meaning. When I read the title I thought someone is trying to lower the weight of Maxwell's contribution by suggesting he merely discovered them, not "invented" them.

Does anyone know why the regex is there? I find it hard to see how english communication is improved by removing random words.

It's to avoid headlines being extra attention grabby. It's an imperfect program, but it does alright.

I want an AMA on whoever had an army of upvoter bots on early Reddit such that every front page post would have a dictionary typo.

oh oh

if you aren't afraid of difficult math breaking your brain, I highly recommend this youtube channel "PhysicsExplained" (sorry I forget his actual name but he is brilliant)

he has a recent two-parter on Maxwell and electro-magnetism that are EXCELLENT

* part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqxrlunKCaU

* part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt1KJtD4Qh8

but I am not kidding about the math, he starts off slow and gentle and hooks you in, but sometimes after 10 minutes in my brain is screaming and cannot keep up

If you like this make sure you watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDlZ-aY9GN4

which explains that magnetism is just an emergent property when you start from Coulomb's law and relativity.

Nah, special relativity is a consequence of magnetism.

You're reading something that isn't there.

That's not how Purcell's textbook put it.

ok? well, textbooks can be wrong or misguided.

Um...

The original title is much better How Maxwell's Equations Were Discovered. As it is now Maxwell's Equations Were Discovered it sounds like they were just discovered or someone rediscovered the equations.

I expected a philosophical discussion as to whether scientific models are discovered or invented.

Only because it made to the HN front page.

A lot of stilted dialog first. Fine, fine, fine, I get it. Not everyone is a natural presenter.

Then I got to

> How copper and metal plates were combined

and I stopped.

"metal plates"? Copper's not a metal? Some details would be helpful. Zinc maybe?

I guess I would read this as “copper” as a primary requirement / necessity and some other metal as a secondary requirement. Are you just being pedantic?

regarding your objection to 'metal'—technically that wasn't a 'dialog' but a 'monolog(ue)'.

Interesting, I need to look into Maxwell's original formulation with the vortices. You can write electrodynamics in terms of small spinning elements: https://forwardscattering.org/page/Intuitive%20Quantum%20Ele...

I can imagine the world where this post gets more visibility through a funny regex error than actual equations :)

Those godawful ads on youtube though. I pay goog to suspend them, but I forgot to login on my phone and now I’ll be haunted the rest of today by the snippet of a mouth-breathing honey vendor who popped up on screen before I could scroll away.

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