Blog Post 11: The Electric boy

Blog Post 11:

In this episode, Neil DeGrasse Tyson discusses Electromagnetism. Tyson discusses some of the famous scientists that evolved their work around electricity including Isaac Newton. After many unsuccessful attempts to harness electricity, scientist Michael Faraday would create the first electric motor by controlling electricity using magnets. Faraday would go on to emphasize that electricity and magnetisms were connected to unseen field. Faraday continues to discover the Faraday effect that which leads to the discover of earth’s magnetic field. All this work was initially rejected by the scientific community due to a lack of mathematical support until James Clark Maxwell redid Faraday’s theories applying Maxwell’s equations. Maxwell’s and Faraday’s contributions have led to a lot of the conveniences that we use every day like the internet and phones.

I liked this episode because it discusses the use of electricity and how we can apply it to the conveniences we use today. Like a lot of science, discovering Earth’s magnetic field involved a lot of initial rejection and failure but Faraday’s persistence and eventual success proves why it is important to not give up in science. This episode speaks volumes to the basis of science which involves a lot of experimentation and failure.