Magnetism
History

Magnetism was first discovered in the ancient world when people noticed that lodestones, naturally magnetized pieces of the mineral magnetite, could attract iron. The word magnet comes from the Greek term μαγνῆτις λίθος magnētis lithos, "the Magnesian stone, lodestone". In ancient Greece, Aristotle attributed the first of what could be called a scientific discussion of magnetism to the philosopher Thales of Miletus, who lived from about 625 BC to about 545 BC. The ancient Indian medical text Sushruta Samhita describes using magnetite to remove arrows embedded in a person's body.

In ancient China, the earliest literary reference to magnetism lies in a 4th-century BC book named after its author, Guiguzi. The 2nd-century BC annals, Lüshi Chunqiu, also notes:"The lodestone makes iron approach; some (force) is attracting it." The earliest mention of the attraction of a needle is in a 1st-century work Lunheng (Balanced Inquiries): "A lodestone attracts a needle." The 11th-century Chinese scientist Shen Kuo was the first person to write—in the Dream Pool Essays —of the magnetic needle compass and that it improved the accuracy of navigation by employing the astronomical concept of true north.By the 12th century, the Chinese were known to use the lodestone compass for navigation. They sculpted a directional spoon from lodestone in such a way that the handle of the spoon always pointed south.

Alexander Neckam, by 1187, was the first in Europe to describe the compass and its use for navigation. In 1269, Peter Peregrinus de Maricourt wrote the Epistola de magnete, the first extant treatise describing the properties of magnets. In 1282, the properties of magnets and the dry compasses were discussed by Al-Ashraf Umar II, a Yemeni physicist, astronomer, and geographer.

Leonardo Garzoni 's only extant work, the Due trattati sopra la natura, e le qualità della calamita (Two treatises on the nature and qualities of the magnet), is the first known example of a modern treatment of magnetic phenomena. Written in years near 1580 and never published, the treatise had a wide diffusion. In particular, Garzoni is referred to as an expert in magnetism by Niccolò Cabeo, whose Philosophia Magnetica (1629) is just a re-adjustment of Garzoni's work. Garzoni's treatise was known also to Giovanni Battista Della Porta.

In 1600, William Gilbert published his De Magnete, Magneticisque Corporibus, et de Magno Magnete Tellure (On the Magnet and Magnetic Bodies, and on the Great Magnet the Earth). In this work he describes many of his experiments with his model earth called the terrella. From his experiments, he concluded that the Earth was itself magnetic and that this was the reason compasses pointed north whereas, previously, some believed that it was the pole star Polaris or a large magnetic island on the north pole that attracted the compass.

An understanding of the relationship between electricity and magnetism began in 1819 with work by Hans Christian Ørsted, a professor at the University of Copenhagen, who discovered, by the accidental twitching of a compass needle near a wire, that an electric current could create a magnetic field. This landmark experiment is known as Ørsted's Experiment. Jean-Baptiste Biot and Félix Savart, both of whom in 1820 came up with the Biot–Savart law giving an equation for the magnetic field from a current-carrying wire. Around the same time, André-Marie Ampère carried out numerous systematic experiments and discovered that the magnetic force between two DC current loops of any shape is equal to the sum of the individual forces that each current element of one circuit exerts on each other current element of the other circuit.

In 1831, Michael Faraday discovered that a time-varying magnetic flux induces a voltage through a wire loop. In 1835, Carl Friedrich Gauss hypothesized, based on Ampère's force law in its original form, that all forms of magnetism arise as a result of elementary point charges moving relative to each other. Wilhelm Eduard Weber advanced Gauss's theory to Weber electrodynamics.

From around 1861, James Clerk Maxwell synthesized and expanded many of these insights into Maxwell's equations, unifying electricity, magnetism, and optics into the field of electromagnetism. However, Gauss's interpretation of magnetism is not fully compatible with Maxwell's electrodynamics. In 1905, Albert Einstein used Maxwell's equations in motivating his theory of special relativity, requiring that the laws held true in all inertial reference frames. Gauss's approach of interpreting the magnetic force as a mere effect of relative velocities thus found its way back into electrodynamics to some extent.

Electromagnetism has continued to develop into the 21st century, being incorporated into the more fundamental theories of gauge theory, quantum electrodynamics, electroweak theory, and finally the standard model.
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