Re: Late 17th-century physics question


Front Office wrote:
josefmatz wrote:
Newton was also inventor of differential analysis.In those days there was no
mathematical tools for electromagnetism.
Some effects were known only but no electromagnetic theory which came much
later.So anyway they had no theory.

Josef Matz


"Front Office" <YoMo.nospam@xxxxxxxxx> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:TdmdnWg-juuOkvbYnZ2dnUVZ_ridnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Isaac Newton's Universal Gravitation was maligned during his life
as "invoking occult agencies" because of its force-at-a-distance
aspect.

In those days, force was considered to be conveyed ONLY by
actual physical contact between material bodies.

Does anyone know how the forces associated with magnetism
and electricity were explained in those days?

Thanks for any insight into this matter.

Bob

armistead_rap[AT]bigfoot.com




There must have been a theory or explanation, one equivalent to
the earlier dominant theory of gravity, namely that of Descartes
which postulated vortexes of invisible matter circling the sun and
guiding the planets in their orbits.

Descartes used no calculus to derive that idea or theory.

Was there anything equivalent for the electric and magnetic forces
in those days, to explain their force-at-a-distance aspects?

Bob

It was all explained by aether. Or smoke and mirrors. The first
people to really quantify electromagnetic interactions were Coulomb in
the late eighteenth century, followed by Ampere, Oersted, and Faraday
in the early nineteenth. Then Maxwell capped it all off by writing
down the final form of the equations that we have today. Throughout it
all, the assumption was that there had to be some sort of medium
through which radiation and forces could be propagated. Today, we know
that aether is just a silly as action at a distance.

.

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