Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
which may have been the decisive element in the Battle of Britain
and in the Nazi defeat in World War Two (which I like to think of
as 'Dafty', the boy who didn't fit in, reaching into the future and
saving the descendants of his tormentors); the control and navigation
of airplanes, ships and spacecraft; radio astronomy and the
search for extraterrestrial intelligence; and significant aspects of
the electrical power and microelectronics industries.
What's more, Faraday's and Maxwell's notion of fields has been
enormously influential in understanding the atomic nucleus, quantum
mechanics, and the fine structure of matter. His unification of
electricity, magnetism and light into one coherent mathematical
whole is the inspiration for subsequent attempts - some successful,
some still in their rudimentary stages - to unify all aspects of
the physical world, including gravity and nuclear forces, into one
grand theory. Maxwell may fairly be said to have ushered in the
age of modern physics.
Our current view of the silent world of Maxwell's varying
electric and magnetic vectors is described by Richard Feynman in
these words:
Try to imagine what the electric and magnetic fields look like
at present in the space of this lecture room. First of all, there
is a steady magnetic field; it comes from the currents in the
interior of the earth - that is, the earth's steady magnetic
field. Then there are some irregular, nearly static electric
fields produced perhaps by electric charges generated by
friction as various people move about in their chairs and rub
their coat sleeves against the chair arms. Then there are other
magnetic fields produced by oscillating currents in the electrical
wiring - fields which vary at a frequency of 60 cycles per
second, in synchronism with the generator at Boulder Dam.
But more interesting are the electric and magnetic fields
varying at much higher frequencies. For instance, as light
travels from window to floor and wall to wall, there are little
wiggles of the electric and magnetic fields moving along at
186,000 miles per second. Then there are also infrared waves
travelling from the warm foreheads to the cold blackboard.
And we have forgotten the ultraviolet light, the X-rays, and
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