The phrase: “Electricity How” – at least one riddle?

According to Google, 368,000 searches for the keyword “electricity how” were performed worldwide in a month. What are people asking or looking for?

Certainly, electricity is one of the great mysteries.

For one, it is everywhere in our ordinary everyday life. We just wouldn’t know how to live without it today. Virtually everything we do runs on electricity.

So, in a sense, it’s very familiar and common.

We also know that it can be very dangerous, even deadly.

But what is electricity?

I don’t pretend to really understand. But, I find it fascinating and worthy of discussion and speculation.

To that end, there is a website below that I find both entertaining and thought-provoking.

One of the missions of this site is to allow people to discuss, speculate, and share information and ideas about electricity. Some things will be very realistic and practical, others very esoteric and almost metaphysical.

This short article is intended to stimulate a discussion and get the ball rolling, so to speak. You are invited to participate by leaving comments or contributing to guest blogs.

Here are some thoughts from a non-scientist, no electrician, no historian, just a humble math professor.

Our ancestors were vaguely aware of electricity in the form of lightning bolts and static electrical sparks. They also knew about magnetism through lodestones (were there other magnetic materials they knew about?). However, they probably did not see much of a connection between these three phenomena. They probably didn’t think these things were very important. Until the house burned down or the compass failed.

In the 1700s, Ben Franklin began to gain some understanding of electricity to the point of inventing the lightning rod and the battery. In fact, it could be argued that the American Revolution depended on Ben’s fame as a scientist when he visited France on behalf of the Revolution.

In the 1800s, the great experimenter Michael Faraday was the first to demonstrate the intimate connection between electric current and magnetic forces with his discovery of Faraday’s Laws. Then the great physicist James Clerk Maxwell was able to construct a mathematical model of electromagnetism known as Maxwell’s Equations.

Thus, electricity and magnetism were irrevocably linked. In fact, one cannot have one without the other. There is an electromagnetic force. Magnets move and induce electrical current, and the current creates magnetic force.

In fact, Maxwell’s equations became the basis for modern electrical technologies.

Furthermore, Maxwell’s equations produced the concept of the electromagnetic wave, of which light is just one example. Electromagnetic waves travel at variable frequencies, but with a constant speed that is invariable regardless of the movement of the observer. This speed is called c, the speed of light.

This unchanging speed of light in turn led physicist Albert Einstein to create his famous Special Theory of Relativity in 1905. This totally altered our concept of time and space forever. (General Relativity in 1915 was an even bigger tour de force explaining the relationship of mass and gravity to space-time, but that’s another story for another time.)

But the electricity was just warming up!

The best was yet to come.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the greatest electrical engineer of all time, Nikola Tesla, applied Maxwell’s equations and invented the AC electric dynamo that became the foundation of our modern industrial revolution. The original, of course, was driven by mechanical and hydraulic (sic) concepts.

Then came the amazing Richard Feynman, et. para.

Quantum mechanics was developed by several great physicists at the beginning of the 20th century. Guys like Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and Dirac developed the unintuitive theory of quantum mechanics after Max Planck and Einstein made their observations on the quantum nature of light.

But how did electricity fit in?

Feynman and others developed the first quantum treatment of electricity and light, known as QED, Quantum Electro Dynamics.

Talk about not intuitive.

What is an electron?

Is it a point or a wave?

Nobody really knows. Both, neither, or something completely mysterious?

When measured, it seems to always be an infinitesimally small piece of matter with some mass and something called charge and “spin”.

But, when observed, it appears to somehow travel on all possible paths from one point to another simultaneously and most of the paths cancel in some way. This is indisputable and is what explains many mysterious phenomena.

In fact, it can be verified experimentally that an electron somehow passes through two slits at the same time. This is the famous double slit experiment that verifies the amazing quantum equations that govern the behavior of the electron

This can probably be best understood by a layman reading Feynman’s great book, QED. In my opinion, this is the best “peek” into the mind of a genius there is.

If this confuses you, you’re in good company. And I don’t mean “sincerely,” though I don’t even claim to begin to understand it all.

And I haven’t even mentioned Bell’s theorem, which is really mind blowing. I can discuss it and various other ideas in an expanded article on the website.

Oh yeah. The best company?

The brilliant physicist of Nobel Prize-winning QED fame Richard Feynman said that anyone who claims to understand QED proves they don’t understand it at all. And, He invented it.

The so-called “wave” is a mathematical “fiction”. The electron satisfies a mathematical differential equation called the Schrödinger wave equation. But, its solutions are called complex functions. They don’t really have any intuitive physical interpretation. The equation turns out to be similar in form to the equations that represent real physical waves. But, in this situation there is nothing physical that they model. Their solution is called “amplitudes”, which give probabilities when “squared”.

So, here we are in the 21st century. Much of our modern technology, think Laser et al, is based on QED, which itself is a theory that we have no real physical understanding of other than can be described as “weird” physical experiments.

Of course, nature also depends on this strange physics. Recently, it has been discovered that photosynthesis, the basis of all life on earth, depends on a quantum mechanical effect.

God only knows where Bell’s theorem will take us. Perhaps the great ideas of Dr. William Tiller will help us. Another discussion for another day.

Well, this article only scratches the surface of addressing the “How to Electricity” question. I don’t even know whether to end with a period or a question mark.