Before finishing reading this wall of text, I want to know. What is the point of this? How can this help humanity anyhow? And specially, will this enable space-travel?
Physics has helped mankind since its inception. You know all those wacky things like TV, phones, electricity, etc...? Yeah, you can thank physics.[/QUOTE]
And don't forget that you can't predict that sort of thing. Without physicists doing wacky things with electromagnetism with no conceivable application, Maxwell couldn't have figured out the laws of electromagnetism (also without an immediately apparent application). Yet without Maxwell, absolutely
nothing the slightest bit complex relying on electricity could ever have been built.
The point is, with science, the applications are frequently a century or more down the line, but when they happen, they are
huge.[/QUOTE]
Professor Mode, ACTIVATED:
Maxwell didn't. Maxwell is mostly responsible for bringing together the works of three other famous scientists into one cohesive mass. He put Faraday's Law together with Ampere's Law and Gauss's Law (and an unnamed but known 4th equation). He's most famous for "correcting" Ampere's Law by developing the displacement current (i.e. changing electric fields create magnetic fields--a current flowed even in a cut wire when AC was applied). They are assigned the name Maxwell's Equations mostly in historical reference to an article he published containing the previously discovered laws + his correction.
Professor Mode, DEACTIVATE!
<---me
