Sean Carroll

You know, Einstein famously said spooky action at a distance for quantum mechanics.

But even in Newton's time, there was this weird thing.

What is it that takes the gravitational force and moves it from the sun to the earth, et cetera?

And vice versa.

Yeah.

And in some way, there was an answer there from Laplace, Pierre-Simon Laplace.

But it wasn't until Faraday, like you said, that he starts moving magnets and watching electrical currents pop up in a wire next to it.

Like, not there, not touching it, right?

Through empty space, something happened.

And the great thing about Faraday was he was an absolutely genius philosopher.

intuitive physicist he was not the math expert that you sometimes need to be so maxwell james clark maxwell came along was a huge admirer of faraday and basically made it all mathematically respectable and said yeah there's these things called the electric field and the magnetic field and they fill all of space and you can't see them but we can predict what they're going to do and they're super duper important for explaining everything

That's possible.

I didn't know quite that factoid, but it's absolutely in keeping.

He was thinking about, in fact, it wasn't even fields that he primarily focused on.

He imagined lines of force.

So like out of an electron, there's an electric field, we would say now, but he thought they were like literally lines of force filling all of space.

And Maxwell's

first papers were about trying to make mathematical sense of lines of force.

And he eventually said, no, it's better to think of fields with little vectors, so like little arrows at every point, and then the lines are sort of moving in the direction of the arrows.

All happened in the 19th century.