The Institute of Physics event on 16 September 2020 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Hans-Christian Oersted's seminal paper on electromagnetism will now be held as a webinar.In July 1820, Hans Christian Oersted (1777-1851) of the University of Copenhagen published a four-page text “Experiments on the effect of the electric conflict on the magnetic needle”. He had discovered that a wire carrying an electric current generated by a Voltaic pile affected the orientation of a nearby compass needle and in particular that the effect circulated outside the wire in the plane perpendicular to it. Within months, André-Marie Ampère (1775-1836) had extended Oersted’s work by experiment and mathematics. Ampère published his magnum opus on electrodynamics in 1826/1827, establishing himself, according to James Clerk Maxwell, as the “Newton of electricity”. In 1831, Michael Faraday (1791-1867) discovered the generation of an electric current by moving or changing magnetic fields. This basic physics, discovered between 1820 and 1831, was to underpin a technological revolution and also to pose intellectual problems that fascinated scientists up to and including Albert Einstein.
The early giants – Oersted, Ampère, and Faraday – generated sensations and disputes among a large cast of scientists, some of whom are memorialised in the in the names of units or laws but others of whom are better known today for their contributions to other fields of science, or else have fallen into undeserved obscurity.
This webinar will be of interest to scientists who wish to know how familiar concepts originated, and also to professional historians of science.
Speakers include Isobel Falconer (University of St Andrews), Jim Grozier (UCL), Frank James (UCL) and Michael Jewess (History of Physics Group Committee)
For more information and to register, please visit the Institute of Physics website.