Department of Education

City Schools Division of Batac

Region 1
Ferdinand Edralin Marcos Senior High School
General Academic Strand

Electricity and magnetism and Electromagnetic of light

Research in Physical Science

Submitted by:
Marinelle Clarion
G-11 Honesty
CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE UNDERSTANDING OF ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM
AND ELECTROMAGNETIC LIGHT
1. Charles Austin de Coulomb (1736-1806)
The French physicist Charles A. de Coulomb, whose name is used as the unit of electrical
charge, later performed a series of experiments that added important details, as well as
precision, to Priestley's proof. He also promoted the two-fluid theory of electrical charges,
rejecting both the idea of the creation of electricity by friction and Franklin's single-fluid model.
Today the electrostatic force law, also known as Coulomb's Law, is expressed as follows: if two
small objects, a distance r apart, have charges p and q and are at rest, the magnitude of the
force F on either is given by F = Kpq/rr, where K is a constant. According to the International
System of Units, the force is measured in newtons (1 newton = 0.225 lb), the distance in
meters, and the charges in coulombs. The constant K then becomes 8.988 billion. Charges of
opposite sign attract, whereas those of the same sign repel. A coulomb C is a large amount of
charge. To hold a positive coulomb (+ C) 1 meter away from a negative coulomb (- C) would
require a force of 9 billion newtons (2 billion pounds). A typical charged cloud about to give rise
to a lightning bolt has a charge of about 30 coulombs.

2. Hans Christian Oersted & Oersted's Discovery

Hans Christian Oersted was born in 1777 on Rudkjobing in Denmark (NNDB). He studied to
be a doctor in philosophy in 1799 and gave lectures in chemistry and natural philosophy.
Oersted was first to identify the relationship between electric currents and magnetism. In 1820
his discovery that sending an electric current through a wire created a magnetic field was
published.
Scientists and even the ancient Greeks were aware of iron magnets and lodestones,
naturally made magnets with iron cores (Bellis). It was Oersted that found an alternative method
of magnetism. Oersted set up a demonstration for his friends and colleagues by heating up a
wire by using an electric current and he also had a compass on hand for magnetism
demonstrations. During the electricity demonstrations, he noticed that the compass needle
moved when the electric current was switched on and off. The needle was not attracted or
repelled by the wire but instead stood at right angles from it. Oersted contemplated his
discovery but did not publish any explanation for his findings. Oersteds discovery is vital to
modern society because it shows that using a changing magnetic field can generate electricity;
and that electricity can generate a magnetic field (Than). The implications of this discovery can
be found in MRI machines to engines.

3. Michael Faraday & Faraday's Law of Induction

Born on September 22, 1791, Michael Faraday was an English chemist and physicist who
made many important contributions to science despite his lack of formal education in
mathematics. His research with magnetic fields around conductors carrying DC electric currents
lead to the basics of the electromagnetic field in physics, which was later further researched by
James Maxwell. Faraday established that magnetism could affect rays of light, discovered the
principle of electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism, and the laws of electrolysis, invented
electromagnetic
 rotary devices which formed the foundation of electric motor technology, helped make
electricity viable for use in technology, discovered benzene, investigated the clathrate hydrate of
chlorine, invented an early form of the Bunsen burner and the system of oxidation numbers, and
popularised terminology such as anode, cathode, electrode, and ion.
Faradays law of induction is a basic law of electromagnetism relating to the operating
principles of transformers, inductors, and many types of electrical motors and generators. It
states that, The induced electromotive force (EMF) in any closed circuit is equal to the time rate
of change of the magnetic flux through the circuit. It only applies to closed circuits made of thin
wire. The unit of capacitance called the farad F was named after Faraday. A farad is the charge
in coulombs which a capacitor will accept for the potential across it to change 1 volt.

4. Felix Savart
Felix Savart was born June 30, 1791 in Mezieres, France. His family had a history of
becoming engineers and being involved in the military, but Savart chose a different route and
chose to study medicine instead. France at this point was enjoying the victories from the rule of
Napoleon, and after a few years of training Savart was drafted to become a surgeon for the
army. After several of Napoleons defeats, Savart was discharged from the army and
continued his medical education. After graduating with a degree in medicine in Strasbourg,
Savart focused on getting more medical experience and translating De Medicina by Aulus
Cornelius Celsus.
In Metz, Savart set up a medical practice but found he spent more time working on physics
than treating patients. He then built a physics laboratory in which he studied sound, and in
particular, tried building violins according to mathematical principles. In 1819, Savart went to
Paris to find a publisher for his translated De Medicina and so he could speak to Biot about the
acoustics of instruments. Biot found Savarts findings interesting and Savart even created and
demonstrated a trapezoidal violin that provided a superior sound to the normal violin.
Biot was also studying electricity when Savart arrived, which led to the pair joining up when
they heard of Hans Christians Oersteds discovery that when a compass needle that was
near a wire with a current going through it pointed at right angles to it. Together they discovered
the Biot-Savart law: magnetic fields produced by electric currents can be calculated using the
law. They published the paper "Note sur le magnetisme de la pile de Volta" in 1820.
Savart began teaching science in a private school in 1820 and later was elected to the
Academy of Sciences and became a professor of experimental physics. Savart published some
works on his experiments with sound by revealing some of the science on the vibration of the
instrument and other objects that are brought into its vicinity. He also created the Savart disk
which was a rotating disk that helped determine the tone of an instrument by matching the tone.
The frequency was easily determined by the Savart disk. He used his technology to help study
harmonious and discordant sounds.
Savart passed away in Paris on March 16, 1841 a few months short of his 50th birthday.

5. James Maxwell (1831-1879)

Maxwell further concluded that light propagated in electric and magnetic waves,
which he believed would vibrate perpendicular to one another.Following this
discovery, Maxwell revised his papers and gathered the findings, eventually
 publishing them together in his 1873 Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism.
Maxwell's electromagnetic theory of light propagation eventually paved the way for a
number of major technological innovations. The first and possibly most significant of
these occurred in 1888, when Heinrich Hertz used Maxwell's theory to create
instruments capable of sending and receiving radio pulses. This discovery,
contributed to the creation of the television and the microwave and without Maxwell's
tireless efforts, many of the modern conveniences upon which society has come to
depend would not exist. As such, James Clerk Maxwell truly is the champion of
modern day science.
6. Benjamin Franklin and Electricity
Electricity was on people's minds in the 1740s, but not in the way we think about it today.
People used electricity for magic tricks by creating sparks and shocks. Scientists conducted
experiments with electricity, but scientific thinking about electricity had not changed much in
hundreds of years. Electricity wasn't "useful" yet.
Benjamin Franklin was interested in electricity. Being a curious and inventive thinker,
Franklin wanted to know more than just the popular tricks. He kept thinking about electricity and
came up with a very important idea.
His idea was about electricity and lightning. Franklin noticed several similarities between the
two: They both created light, made loud crashes when they exploded, were attracted to metal,
had a particular smell, and more. Based on these observations, Franklin thought electricity and
lightning were the same thing. A few people shared his belief, but no one had ever tested it.
Franklin wrote up his thoughts on electricity in several letters to a fellow scientist who lived in
London. This scientist and other scientists in London thought Franklin's letters contained
valuable information, so in 1751 they published them in a little book, Experiments and
Observations on Electricity.
One of the letters contained Franklin's plan for how to prove that electricity and lightning
were the same. His plan required something tall, like a hill or a tall building, but Philadelphia had
neither at the time. While Franklin was waiting for a tall building to be built, he came up with
another plan. This one involved a key and a kite.
Franklin needed something to get close enough to the clouds to attract the lightning. He
couldn't get up there since Philadelphia didn't have any hills or tall buildings. He did have a silk
handkerchief, a couple of sticks and some string, so instead of getting himself up near the
lightning, he flew a kite up to it. And it worked! Franklin and a few other scientists in Europe
(who did their own experiments) proved that lightning and electricity were the same thing.
But that wasn't enough for Franklin. He believed that this knowledge should be used for
practical purposes.
What could be practical about lightning? Many folks knew what wasn't practical: having your
house burn down because it was struck by lightning. Franklin thought he could help. He knew
that lightning usually hit the highest part of a building. He also knew that the electrical current in
lightning could start a fire. So he invented the lightning rod. A lightning rod is made of metal and
is attached to the highest point on a house. The lightning hits the rod instead of the house, and
the electrical current from the lightning goes into the ground and leaves the house undamaged.
Franklin thought the lightning rod was his most important invention.

7. Jean-Baptiste Biot
French physicist who helped formulate the Biot-Savart law, which concerns magnetic fields,
and laid the basis for saccharimetry, a useful technique of analyzing sugar solutions.
In 1820 he and the physicist Flix Savart discovered that the intensity of the magnetic field
set up by a current flowing through a wire is inversely proportional to the distance from the wire.
This relationship is now known as the Biot-Savart law and is a fundamental part of modern
electromagnetic theory. In 1835, while studying polarized light (light having all its waves in the
same plane), Biot found that sugar solutions, among others, rotate the plane of polarization
when a polarized light beam passes through. Further research revealed that the angle of
rotation is a direct measure of the concentration of the solution. This fact became important in
chemical analysis because it provided a simple, nondestructive way of determining sugar
concentration. For this work Biot was awarded the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society in 1840.

8. Andre Marie Ampere

Andre-Marie Ampere work done in the field of Electromagnetism was his greatest
contribution.
In September 1820, a Danish scientist, Hans Christian Orsted, produced some
experimental results in the field of magnetism. Ampere influenced by his discovery,
discovered the nature of the relationship between electric current-flow and magnetism,
as well as the relationships of the behavior of electric currents in various types of
conductors.
Besides that, Ampere showed that two parallel wires carrying electric currents
magnetically attract to each other, if the currents are in the same direction and repel if
the currents are in opposite directions.
This experiment led Ampere to formulate his law of electromagnetism, Amperes law,
that describes mathematically the magnetic force between two electrical currents, which
states that the mutual action of two lengths of current-carrying wire is proportional to
their lengths and to the intensities of their currents.
Electric current passing through the wire creates magnetic lines of flux that encircle
the wires. Magnetic flux, through the surface which is the component of B field,
passing through it. The circulating magnetic field, is a closed loop, in the electric current
passing through the loop where is the magnetic field.
Thus, this made him the first person to develop measuring techniques for electricity.
The ampere is the unit for measuring electric current.

Examples of Waves
 A wave can be described as a disturbance that travels
through a medium from one location to another location. Consider this example the
first thought concerning waves invokes up a picture of a wave moving across the
surface of an ocean, lake, pond or other body of water. When a pebble is thrown
in a pond, it creates a disturbance and forms ripples which travel together as
a front in a straight-line direction, or the waves may be circular waves that
originate from the point where the disturbances occurs in the pond. The wave is
defined as the energy transferred through medium with regular vibration or
oscillating motion. A few examples of waves are: water wave, light wave,
electromagnetic wave, sound wave, seismic wave (earthquakes). The waves are
classified mainly two types that are longitudinal wave and transverse waves. The sound
waves are good example of longitudinal wave which is travelled medium with the use of
force. This force is exerted between molecules of the medium. The electromagnetic
radiations are transverse waves which also include the light waves. These waves show
displacement in the perpendicular direction of the field intensity vector. The quantum
theory gives the description of wave properties which includes wave intensity, wave
number, wave frequency, energy of wave, wavelength etc. the motion of wave and its
full study is physical phenomena. Lets discuss wave properties and some examples of
waves.

One way to categorize waves is on the basis of the direction of movement of the
distinct particles of the medium relative to the direction that the waves travel. Waves can
be classified into two types Longitudinal Wave and Transverse Wave.
Longitudinal Wave: Longitudinal waves occur when the oscillations are parallel to the
direction of propagation. It is a wave in which particles of the medium move in a
direction parallel to the direction that the wave moves. A sound wave traveling through
air is a classic example of a longitudinal wave.
Transverse Wave: Transverse waves occur when a disturbance creates oscillations
perpendicular at right angles to the direction of energy transfer. It is a wave in which
particles of the medium move in a direction perpendicular to the direction that the wave
moves. The electromagnetic radiations which include light waves are a classic example
of transverse waves.
{The quantum theory gives the description of wave properties which includes wave
intensity, wave number, wave frequency, energy of wave, wavelength etc. the motion of
wave and its full study is physical phenomena. Lets discuss wave properties and some
examples of waves}.
How Heinrich Hertz Discovered Radio Waves
 In November 1886 Heinrich Hertz became the first person to transmit and receive
controlled radio waves.
Considering how indispensable his wireless transmissions quickly became, it seems
a little odd looking back that he had no practical purpose in mind for the radio or
Hertzian waves he discovered.
His research was focused solely on discovering ifJames Clerk Maxwells 1864
theory of electromagnetism was correct.
A Young Man in a Hurry
The first-time Hertz thought seriously about proving Maxwells theory was in 1879,
when he was a 22 year-old student in Berlin. He decided against it. It seemed too hard,
and anyway he wanted to concentrate on completing his doctorate.
In 1883, after getting his first lecturing job, he revisited Maxwells theory. He wrote an
impressive paper, reworking the theory mathematically.
In 1885 he moved to the University of Karlsruhe as a full professor of experimental
physics. Now he decided the time was ripe to look for a way to prove Maxwells theory.
A Spark of Genius
In October 1886 Hertz saw an electrical spark, starting a train of thought that would
end up transforming the world..
Hertz had been demonstrating a piece of electrical apparatus called Riess spirals to
students. The spirals produced electric sparks by a process called magnetic induction.
The sparks flew between spark-gaps small gaps in circuits.
Hertz became fascinated by sparks.
He started generating them using a piece of electrical equipment called an induction
coil. (A cars spark plugs are powered by an induction coil. The induction coil transforms
low voltage dc electricity coming from a cars battery into high voltage ac electricity. This
electricity crosses a small air gap at regular intervals as a spark i.e. you have a spark
plug.)
Hertz spark testing circuit.
Playing around a little with this apparatus, Hertz connected a secondary spark-gap
to the existing spark-gap, as shown.
He used the induction coil to generate high voltage ac electricity, producing a series
of sparks at regular intervals at the main spark-gap.
Hertz found that when sparks flew across the main gap, sparks also usually flew
across the secondary gap that is between points A and B in the image; Hertz called
these side-sparks.
 He found the behavior of the side-sparks highly thought-provoking.
He varied the position of connection point C on the side-circuit. The only way he
could stop side-sparks being produced was to arrange the apparatus so the length of
wire CA was the same as CB.
Given that the electricity was ac, this suggested to Hertz that voltage waves were
separately racing through the wire along paths CA and CB.
If the distances CA and CB were the same, then the same voltage must reach points
A and B at the same time. The electrical waves in CA and CB were said to be in phase
with one another, so sparks could not be generated. Sparks could only be generated if
there was a large voltage difference between points A and B.
Distances CA and CB are equal. Voltage waves reach the spark-gap in phase with
one-another. There is no voltage difference between A and B, so no sparks jump over
the gap.
Distances CA and CB are not equal. Voltage waves reach the spark-gap out of
phase with one-another. There is a voltage difference between A and B, so sparks jump
over the gap.
Perfectly Behaved Electric Waves
Hertz did more experiments which revealed that the sparking at the main gap was
producing beautifully regular electrical waves, whose behavior was predictable.
He pictured waves of electric charge moving back and forth, creating a standing
wave within the wire.
In other words, he believed the circuit was vibrating like a tuning fork at its natural,
resonant frequency. He thought he now had a circuit in resonance.
Of course, in Hertzs circuit the vibrations were not of sound, they were vibrations of
electric charge.
Its worth bearing in mind that resonance is not actually needed for electromagnetic
waves to be produced theyre produced whenever electric charges are accelerated.
The importance of resonance is that if a receiver has the same resonant frequency
as a transmitter, the incoming electromagnetic waves have a much stronger effect on it.
This is similar to the situation in which an opera singer shatters a champagne glass
because its resonant frequency is the same as the note she sings.
Aware that the frequency of electrical vibrations and hence resonance is determined
by electrical properties called inductance and capacitance, Hertz looked more closely at
these factors in the circuit.
Breaking Away
 He identified that a phenomenon called self-induction was taking place in the wires.
This allowed him to deduce that the electric vibrations had an extraordinarily high
frequency.
Hertz decided to break the hard-wired connection between the main spark circuit
and the side-spark circuit, as shown in the image.
He also arranged the capacitance and inductance of the main circuit so its resonant
frequency was 100 million times a second. Today we would write this vibration
frequency as 100 MHz. (The unit of frequency is, of course, the hertz (Hz), named in
Heinrich Hertzs honor.)
According to Maxwells theory, the main circuit would then radiate electromagnetic
waves with a wavelength of about a meter.
Producing and Detecting Radio Waves
In November 1886 Hertz put together his spark-gap transmitter, which he hoped
would transmit electromagnetic waves.
Hertzs spark-gap transmitter. At the ends are two hollow zinc spheres of diameter
30 cm which are 3 m apart. These act as capacitors. 2 mm thick copper wire is run from
the spheres into the middle, where there is a spark-gap. Today we would describe this
oscillator as a half-wave dipole antenna.
For his receiver he used a length of copper wire in the shape of a rectangle whose
dimensions were 120 cm by 80 cm. The wire had its own spark-gap.
Hertz applied high voltage a.c. electricity across the central spark-gap of the
transmitter, creating sparks.
The sparks caused violent pulses of electric current within the copper wires leading
out to the zinc spheres.
As Maxwell had predicted, the oscillating electric charges produced electromagnetic
waves radio waves which spread out at the speed of light through the air around the
wire.
Hertz detected the waves with his copper wire receiver sparks jumped across its
spark gap, even though it was as far as 1.5 meters away from the transmitter. These
sparks were caused by the arrival of electromagnetic waves from the transmitter
generating violent electrical vibrations in the receiver.
This was an experimental triumph. Hertz had produced and detected radio waves.
Strangely, though, he did not appreciate the monumental practical importance of his
discovery.
I do not think that the wireless waves I have discovered will have any practical
application.
 HEINRICH HERTZ 1890
In fact Hertzs waves would soon change the world. By 1896 Guglielmo Marconi had
been granted a patent for wireless communications. By 1901 he had made a wireless
transmission across the Atlantic Ocean from Britain to Canada.
By the early 1900s technically minded people were building their own spark
transmitters at home. Even children got in on the act, with instructions to build a
transmitter appearing in a craft book for boys in 1917.
A Build at Home Spark-Gap Transmitter
Goodbye to Sparks
By the late 1920s most radio transmitters were using vacuum tubes rather than
sparks to generate radio waves. And then the vacuum tubes were abandoned in favor of
transistors.
Scientists and engineers have continued to innovate quickly in the field of radio
technology. Radio, television, satellite communications, mobile phones, radar, and many
other inventions and gadgets have made Hertzs discovery an indispensable part of
modern life.

Properties of Light

The electromagnetic spectrum.

 The light that we see everyday is only a fraction of the total energy emitted by the
sun incident on the earth. Sunlight is a form of "electromagnetic radiation" and the
visible light that we see is a small subset of the electromagnetic spectrum shown at the
right.
The electromagnetic spectrum describes light as a wave which has a particular
wavelength. The description of light as a wave first gained acceptance in the early
1800's when experiments by Thomas Young, Franois Arago,
andAugustin Jean Fresnel showed interference effects in light beams, indicating that
light is made of waves. By the late 1860's light was viewed as part of the
electromagnetic spectrum. However, in the late 1800's a problem with the wave-based
view of light became apparent when experiments measuring the spectrum of
wavelengths from heated objects could not be explained using the wave-based
equations of light. This discrepancy was resolved by the works of in 1900, and in 1905.
Planck proposed that the total energy of light is made up of indistinguishable energy
elements, or a quantum of energy. Einstein, while examining the photoelectric effect (the
release of electrons from certain metals and semiconductors when struck by light),
correctly distinguished the values of these quantum energy elements. For their work in
this area Planck and Einstein won the Nobel prize for physics in 1918 and 1921,
respectively and based on this work, light may be viewed as consisting of "packets" or
particles of energy, called photons.
Today, quantum-mechanics explains both the observations of the wave nature and
the particle nature of light. In quantum mechanics, a photon, like all other quantum-
mechanical particles such as electrons, protons etc, is most accurately pictured as a
"wave-packet". A wave packet is defined as a collection of waves which may interact in
such a way that the wave-packet may either appear spatially localized (in a similar
fashion as a square wave which results from the addition of an infinite number of sine
waves), or may alternately appear simply as a wave. In the cases where the wave-
packet is spatially localized, it acts as a particle. Therefore, depending on the situation,
a photon may appear as either a wave or as a particle and this concept is called "wave-
particle duality". A wave-packet, or photon is pictured as used in PVCDROM below.
 A complete physical description of the properties of light requires a quantum-
mechanical analysis of light, since light is a type of quantum-mechanical particle called
a photon. For photovoltaic applications, this level of detail is seldom required and
therefore only a few sentences on the quantum nature of light are given here. However,
in some situations (fortunately, rarely encountered in PV systems), light may behave in
a manner which seems to defy common sense, based on the simple explanations given
here. The term "common sense" refers to our own observations and cannot be relied on
to observe the quantum-mechanical effects because these occur under conditions
outside the range of human observation. For further information on the modern
interpretation of light please refer to.
There are several key characteristics of the incident solar energy which are critical in
determining how the incident sunlight interacts with a photovoltaic converter or any
other object. The important characteristics of the incident solar energy are:
the spectral content of the incident light;

the radiant power density from the sun;

the angle at which the incident solar radiation strikes a photovoltaic module; and

the radiant energy from the sun throughout a year or day for a particular surface.
By the end of this chapter you should be familiar with the above four concepts.

Characteristics of Light
Newton proposed the particle theory of light to explain the bending of light upon
reflection from a mirror or upon refraction when passing from air into water. In his view,
light was a stream of particles emitted from a light source, entering the eye to stimulate
sight. Newton's contemporary Christiaan Huygens showed that awave theory of
light could explain the laws of reflection and refraction. In the late 1800s, James Clerk
Maxwell predicted, and then Gustav Ludwig Hertz verified, the existence of
electromagnetic waves traveling at the speed of light. A complete conceptualization of
the nature of light includes light as a particle, as a wave, and as electromagnetic
radiation.
The modern view is that light has a dual nature. To debate whether light is a particle
or a wave is inappropriate because in some experiments light acts like a wave and in
others it acts like a particle. Perhaps it is most accurate to say that both waves and
particles are simplified models of reality and that light is such a complicated
phenomenon that no one model from our common experience can be devised to explain
its nature.
Electromagnetic spectrum
Maxwell's equations united the study of electromagnetism and optics. Light is the
relatively narrow frequency band of electromagnetic waves to which our eyes are
sensitive. Figureillustrates the spectrum of visible light. Wavelengths are usually
measured in units of nanometers (1 nm = 10 9 m) or in units of angstroms (1 =
10 10m). The colors of the visible spectrum stretch from violet, with the shortest length,
to red, with the longest wavelength.

Figure 1 The spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, which includes

visible light.

Speed of light
Light travels at such a high speed, 3 10 8 m/sec, that historically it was difficult to
measure. In the late 1600s, Claus Roemer observed differences in the period of the
moons of Jupiter, which varied according to the position of the earth. He correctly
assumed a finite speed of light. He deduced the annual variation was due to a changed
distance between Jupiter and the earth; so a longer period indicated that the light had
farther to travel. His estimate, 2.1 10 8 m/s, based on his value for the radius of the
earth's orbit, was inaccurate, but his theories were sound. Armand Fizeau was the first
to measure the speed of light on the earth's surface. In 1849, he used a rotating toothed
wheel to find a close approximation of the speed of light, 3.15 10 8 m/s. As shown in
Figure , a light beam passed through the wheel, was reflected by a mirror a distance ( d)
away, and then again passed through an opening between cogs.
 Figure 2 Fizeau's apparatus for measuring the speed of light.

Assume the speed of the wheel is adjusted so that the light passing through the
opening a then passes through opening b after reflection. If the toothed wheel spins at
an angular velocity and the angle between the two openings is , then the time for
light to travel 2 d I and so the velocity of light may be calculated from where c denotes
the speed of light. More modern methods with lasers have made measurements
accurate to at least nine decimal places.
Polarization
Light and other elecromagnetic radiation can be polarized because the waves are
transverse. An oscillatory motion perpendicular to the direction of motion of the wave is
the distinguishing characteristic of transverse waves. Longitudinal waves, such as
sound, cannot be polarized. Polarized light has vibrations confined to a single plane
that is perpendicular to the direction of motion. A beam of light can be represented by a
system of light vectors. In Figure 3, unpolarized light is radiating from a light bulb. The
beam going to the top of the page is viewed along the direction of motion (as endon).
The vectors in the beam traveling to the side of the page are seen perpendicular to the
direction of motion (as a side view).

Figure 3
A light bulb emits unpolarized light.
Light is commonly polarized by selective absorption of a polarizing material.
Tourmaline is a naturally occurring crystal that transmits light in only one plane of
polarization and absorbs the light vectors in other polarization planes. This type of
material is called adichroic substance. A mechanical analogy illustrates this process.
Imagine a rope with transverse pulses passing through two frames of slots, as shown in
Figure 4. When the second polarizer is turned perpendicular to the first, the wave
energy is absorbed.
 Figure 4 A mechanical analogy of polarization, for a wave on a string.

Polaroid, another dichroic substance, is manufactured from longchain hydrocarbons

with alignment of the chains. As you will recall, electromagnetic waves are crossed
electric and magnetic fields propagating through space. The orientation of the electric
wave is taken as the direction of polarization. The polaroid molecules can conduct
electric charges parallel to their chains; therefore, hydrocarbon molecules in polaroid
filters absorb light with an electric field parallel to their length and transmit light with
electric field perpendicular to their length.
Figure 5 shows the direction of light vectors for a beam of light traveling through two
polaroids. The first polaroid is called thepolarizer, and the second polaroid is called
an analyzer. When the transmission axes of the polarizing materials are parallel, the
polarized light passes through. Light is nearly completely absorbed when passing
through two sets of polarizing materials with their transmission axes at right angles.

Figure 5 A sequence of polaroids.

Light can be polarized by reflection. For this reason, polaroid sunglasses are
effective for reducing glare. Sunlight is primarily polarized parallel to the surface after
reflection; therefore, the polaroids in sunglasses are oriented so that the reflected
polarized light is largely absorbed.
Magnetic force (velocity dependence)
 The magnetic force is a force that acts on a charge moving through a magnetic field.
This moving charge can take the form of either a current in a wire or a charged particle
moving with some velocity. The magnitude of this force is proportional to the current and
the magnitude of the magnetic field, and the direction of the force is perpendicular both
to the magnetic field and to the direction of the current. Additionally, magnetic fields can
be produced by moving charges. This means that two current carrying wires placed side
by side will each experience a magnetic force caused by the magnetic field of the
opposite wire. It is important to note that a charge object will only feel a magnetic force if
it is moving.
Heinrich Hertz
Heinrich Hertz was a German physicist born in 1857 in Hamburg. His family was
quite prosperous, so he had access to high quality education. Hertz was particularly
skilled in science and engineering. He studied at many schools across Germany,
earning his PhD in 1880 from the University of Berlin. After earning his degree, Hertz did
some post-doctoral study and eventually took a professorship at the University of
Karlsruhe. Hertz made many contributions to the study of electromagnetic theory,
expanding the ideas that had been put forward by James Maxwell. In 1886, Hertz was
able to prove the existence of electromagnetic waves. He did so by setting up a radio
wave transmitter that produced a spark at a set frequency. He then used a circle of wire
with a very small gap between the ends as a receiver. The electromagnetic waves
produced by the transmitter created an oscillating current in the loop of wire which
created sparks across the gap in the receiver. Hertz was able to refine his experiments
to show that these electromagnetic waves travelled at the same speed as light, thereby
proving Maxwells hypothesis. For his contributions, the unit for frequency was named
the hertz.
Properties of waves
A wave can be defined as follows:

It is important to realize that a wave is quite a different object than a particle. A

baseball thrown through a window transfers energy from one point to another, but this
involves the movement of a material object between two points. A common example of
a wave is a wave on the ocean - we know they carry energy, as they cause erosion on
the shore, but material (i. e., water) is not continuously being transferred onto the shore.
Another example of a wave is a sound wave, which is vibrations of air molecules which
propagate from one place to another. These also carry energy, but do not involve the
mass movement of air from one place to another.
A simple type of wave is illustrated below.
 Figure 10.12: A simple wave

The main properties of waves are defined below.

Amplitude: the height of the wave, measured in meters.

Wavelength: the distance between adjacent crests, measured in meters.

Period: the time it takes for one complete wave to pass a given point, measured
in seconds.
Frequency: the number of complete waves that pass a point in one second,
measured in inverse seconds, or Hertz (Hz).
Speed: the horizontal speed of a point on a wave as it propagates, measured in
meters / second.
Not all of these properties are independent; one has the relations
Period = 1 / frequency
Speed = wavelength / period = wavelength x frequency