magnetism

Sense And Nonsense In Elementary Electricity And Magnetism

by

Today my students wrote the final exam in the first-year university course in electricity and magnetism (+ a two-week introduction to quantum physics at the end of the course) that I taught this past semester. I reproduce the first question on the exam below. Worth 20% of the marks on the exam (each of the … Read more

Mysteries of Magnetism

by

The ancient Greeks thought of atoms as the smallest, indivisible bits of matter. By the twentieth century, experiments showed that (what we nowadays call) atoms have internal structure; a key early experiment was the Geiger-Marsden experiment, performed under the supervision of Rutherford, about which we’ll have more to say in a future post. But the … Read more