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- [00:07]
John Bachmann
From the historic campus of Hillsdale College
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Scott Bertram
in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the
- [00:13]
Dr. Nathan Herring
true and the beautiful are taught, nurtured
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Scott Bertram
and honored, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.
- [00:25]
John Bachmann
So you start to see the dominoes start to tumble. It helped the Reagan administration kind of get the confidence to do operations like Urgent Fury. And then, you know, obviously people started to take notice in some of those eastern bloc countries that America was back.
- [00:40]
Scott Bertram
This is your host, Scott Bertram. Welcome to the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. That was John Bachmann. He's the author of the new book Turning How Reagan Liberated Grenada and Won the Cold War. We'll go in depth with John about his book on this week's episode. Also coming up a bit later, from Hillsdale's physics department, Nathan Herring. We'll discuss the great physicist James Clerk Maxwell. First, we're joined by John Bachmann. He is an award winning journalist and host of John Bachman now on newsmax. Also the author of the new book Turning How Reagan Liberated Grenada and Won the Cold War. John, thanks so much for joining us.
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John Bachmann
It's great to be with you, Scott.
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Scott Bertram
You say in Turning Point that this Grenada, why you're writing about it, in fact, is that the battle for Grenada begins the fall of the Soviet Union. How do those dominoes fall?
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John Bachmann
You know, this was really the first real major military conflict since Vietnam that involved all branches of the military. And there had been this lingering fear of loss and, you know, the cloud that hung over the country after Vietnam. And it really took something like this, even though it was a relatively small war, it took something like this to kind of turn the tides and get America to get its moxie back. And that's certainly what happened. This is perhaps the only instance where in our lifetimes where we went into a country, we fully liberated that country from a Marxist regime, returned the power back to the people and also rescued a lot of Americans in the process. And it sent a message to the rest of the world, a lot of the countries that were turning Communists in Central and South America to the Soviet Union, to Cuba as well, that America was no longer going to cede any more territory to Marxists in their own backyard.
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Scott Bertram
Turning Point is not just a description of the battle itself, Operation Urgent Fury, but also a history lesson into what was happening before and leading up to that event. And the change all starts with a change in the White House with Ronald Reagan winning the presidency. He rejects this idea that we can coexist. He rejects the detente that previous presidents had set. How would you describe Reagan's philosophy when it comes to matters like what we saw in Grenada?
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John Bachmann
I think Reagan was perfectly clear, and he understood exactly what the objective was and what needed to happen. Yes, he wanted to end communism, and he gets credit for doing that, ending the Cold War. But more than anything else, Reagan really wanted to get rid of nuclear weapons. That was his ultimate goal, a goal that still eludes everyone today. But he understood what it took. He understood what the real dangers were that faced the United States then and to, in many aspects, has come back to haunt us again in present day. But Reagan, I think, is different than a lot of presidents. And this is something that I was told by many of the people that were in the administration, people that I interviewed for the book. You could never move Reagan more than 1 or 2 degrees off his true North Star on certain issues. And one of those was democracy, freedom for countries that were living under the thumb of communism.
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Scott Bertram
Something that occurred to me as I read through Turning Point is this idea of Ronald Reagan and the philosophy you outline. How was he so sure? Why was he so sure that this Cold War was not going to turn hot, at least anytime soon?
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John Bachmann
I mean, it was funny because Reagan was referred to inside the Soviet Union as the cowboy. And I think a lot of people here in the United States, some of his adversaries, his critics, many members of the press, thought of him as reckless. They didn't give him credit for being, you know, a real intellectual, you know, someone who knew. Knew what he was talking about. But Reagan was really backed by his faith, and that was something that guided him in all the decisions pretty much that he made. And I think also one of the things that really inspired me to write this book was I had a conversation with a man named Sal Russo who was a lobbyist in Washington, D.C. but prior to that, he knew Ronald Reagan before he even ran for governor of California. And he would always talk about how cool, calm, and collected Ronald Reagan was. People would stab him in the back politically, rhetorically speaking, and he wouldn't seek revenge. But the one time he was really upset is when he decided to go into Grenada. They felt like for security reasons, they could not give Margaret Thatcher any heads up. They had been talking about it, but they didn't actually tell her that they were going in. And Reagan was really rattled by the fact that he worried what that would do to his friendship with Thatcher. He considered her to be someone critical to his ultimate goals of bringing peace and stability around the world. And he Worried that if he did this, he could fracture their friendship. And, you know, that's evident. There's recordings of the actual phone call he made to her immediately after the fact. And it did cause Margaret Thatcher a lot of turmoil in her own country. But because they were so close, they obviously continued to work together, and she stayed in office even after Ronald Reagan did. But there was a true bond between those two. And without the way they worked together, it's fair to say that the Cold War would not have ended when it did.
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Scott Bertram
I was curious, would it be accurate to say the US feelings about the Falklands War be somewhat similar to the UK feelings about what happened in Grenada?
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John Bachmann
Well, we dive into this a little bit in the book, and it's one of the things that I write about, because Reagan didn't really have the team he needed in place from the get go. He had Alexander Haig as his Secretary of State. And Alexander Haig was kind of in a different position than Ronald Reagan was when it came to the Falklands War. And ultimately the United States. Publicly, they were not on board with that. But again, it shows how independent Reagan was in his thinking. And everyone knows the story. Alexander Haig was ultimately. He ultimately resigned, and Reagan accepted his resignation. That's a critical point in the story because it tells us that puts George Shultz in as Secretary of State, and really that's the team that Reagan needed to make these type of decisions to, in fact, invade Grenada.
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Scott Bertram
Talking to John Bachmann, his book is turning How Reagan Liberated Grenada and Won the Cold War. Let's set the table a bit here. This is 1983. Cuban and Soviet influence has entered Grenada. There's an assassination, the ruling president, and Grenada is now under the thumb of a brutal Marxist regime. Sort of explain what's happening during this time.
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John Bachmann
Yeah, there was a president named Maurice Bishop, and he was relatively moderate, as Communists go. Maurice Bishop had even come to the United States. He wanted to, by many accounts, he wanted to eventually hold elections. Grenada was part of the British Commonwealth, and it was ruled by a guy named Eric Gary, who was sort of a strong man, didn't really treat the people properly. And then you had a communist revolution. Maurice Bishop came in. It was a bloodless revolution. And like a lot of places around the world, there was this appetite for liberate, you know, these liberation fronts, similar to what happened in Nicaragua around the same time. But when Maurice Bishop realized that he was going to have to choose between the west and Communism, he started to reach out to Ronald Reagan. He came to ask for money for the Runway. Obviously, Reagan was not going to give any money to a communist. And his number two is his friend. His closest confidant was a guy named Bernard Coward, who was more hardline than Maurice Bishop. And I think this is one of the lessons when you research communist regimes around the world. If you start to waver from your Marxist position, there is a more ruthless Marxist willing to step in and have you assassinated. And that's what happened to Maurice Bishop. Bernard Coward and the Grenadians under his power assassinated Maurice Bishop. And that is when the urgency really came into place for the Americans. Because there was a St. George's Medical School there. There was hundreds of students studying there. There were over a thousand Americans on the island. And there was a man who actually worked inside the Reagan administration named Constantine Menges, who was a national security advisor, who was a fascinating person. He has a great book called Inside the National Security Council. And he was the one who really pitched this idea and pushed this idea from inside the administration that we need to not only rescue these Americans, but we have a real opportunity to restore democracy to a tiny is and send a message to the world that this is not going to be tolerated. And so what the Reagan administration certainly did not want to do was repeat what happened with the Islamist revolution in Iran. They were very concerned. There was a shoot on sight order, there was a curfew in place. When you hear the stories of some of these Americans, their lives were being threatened. And so that's why there was so much secrecy. That's why they decided at the time not to bring any press along, which was also very controversial at the time. There was no embedded press that went into Grenada with the initial wave of troops. So that paramount reason number one was to get in there and rescue the Americans. But they also really thought they could do restore democracy there.
- [09:47]
Scott Bertram
John Bachmann, hold on. We'll continue in a moment talking more about turning how Reagan Liberated Grenada and won the Cold War. Right now, I want to invite you to subscribe to hear new episodes of this show every single week. Head to Spotify, head to Apple podcasts, head to YouTube or your favorite podcast provider. Click the subscribe button. It helps us know you're there and allows you to get new episodes every week as soon as they are released right on your device. Click subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or elsewhere. And help make sure you never miss an episode of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Continuing now with John Bachmann of Newsmax. His new book, Turning How Reagan Liberated Grenada and won the Cold War. John, in writing the book, what did you find? What was different about Grenada? What has changed in the 40 plus years since then in how we think about and how we view operations like this?
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John Bachmann
We hear so much these days about these regime change wars and all our foreign military adventures. But I felt like it was really important to give, you know, my generation, I'm 46, and so many of my peers and even the younger generation tell a story about a time when Americans did succeed in battle. At the time, you know, this also happened almost at the same time, in fact, at the same week as the Beirut, Lebanon Marine barracks bombing. There's actually a story in the book about Ronald Reagan being at Augusta National Country Club. He was supposed to be his first vacation, first time off since. Since he was shot. He was there playing golf with George Shultz and other folks. And then there was a hostage situation. A guy ran the gates of Augusta national, took some people hostage. He was upset about the economy. Ronald Reagan talked him down. That guy was arrested. The Marine barrack bombing happened in Beirut. And while this is all going on, Reagan has the clear head and the thought to go ahead and authorize Operation Urgent Fury. So all this stuff was going on at the same time, but he understood the importance of the American lives and the importance of restoring democracy, even on a tiny island that most people had never heard of or certainly couldn't pick out on the map.
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Scott Bertram
John Bachmann, with us, his book Turning How Reagan Liberated Grenada and Won the Cold War. You say in Turning Point that Reagan from an early point was inclined to act militarily in this matter in Grenada. Was there anyone close or inside the administration telling him that was the wrong thing to do at this point?
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John Bachmann
No. And again, this came after Alexander Haig. You know, there's a famous story, too, and Haig was kind of all over the map on what he. He was telling Reagan he wanted him to do and what his policy should be. And that's one of the reasons why Reagan, I think, was inclined to accept Haig's resignation. There's a story about early on in the administration when Haig basically told Reagan that he should turn Cuba into a parking lot. And Reagan understood the implications of that and the repercussions of that. And there's also a story when Ronald Reagan, right before this was Christmas of 1981, they were going to orchestrate a strike of the dock workers here in the United States. There had been a deal reached with the Soviet countries that they were going that the United States, you Know, as part of the thawing of tensions, they were going to send farm equipment over to the. To Ukraine and the Soviet Union in exchange, you know, just to keep trade relations going a little bit. But Reagan wanted to orchestrate a strike and have the American dock workers refuse to send the equipment over there out of solidarity with the Polish and lqualensa and the solidarity movement there as they were starting to push back. And it was one of these situations where Alexander Haig said, if Reagan did that and the Soviets caught wind of it, it would start World War Three. And Reagan calmly said, let's do it. And as he walked out of the room, Haig was emphatic about, you can't do this, Mr. President. And Reagan calmly said, well, boys, you better stock up on vodka. And he left the room in his kind of signature way. But that goes back to what we were talking about, how clear headed Ronald Reagan was and what he believed. And we saw that later on in the administration. But this was really the point, I think, where he had the team around him that he needed to make these types of decisions to, you know, there was a lot of fear still from Democrats. I also tell the story about, you know, how resistant Democrats were to Republicans needing to build more military, build up the military. Again, Reagan understood the time. He knew what was necessary. And this was just, you know, a small geographic, small time frame. Part of the administration, but something that set the stage for what was to come.
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Scott Bertram
Familiar name for many of us, General Norman Schwarzkopf. The description inside Turning Point of how he becomes involved in Operation Urgent Fury.
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John Bachmann
Yes, it was fascinating to see the story of General Schwarzkopf and what he meant to this operation. He was the Army's main commanding officer. He was tapped for this operation and really did some heroic things to make sure that the fighting was intense for those four days and a lot of people were really badly hurt. And General Schwarzkopf was obviously a soldier's general and made that happen from Georgia. He was on base there and got tapped to lead the operation in Grenada. Kind of quickly saw that there were some, maybe some bad decisions being made by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Pentagon, but really kind of marshaled everyone together to make sure it was a successful operation.
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Scott Bertram
John Bachmann with us at book turning how Reagan liberated Grenada and won the Cold War. Four days of fighting, if my number is correct. 19Americans killed in Operation Urgent Fury. Did Reagan consider everything a success when all was said and done?
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John Bachmann
Yes, he did, and I think everyone else in the administration considered it. In the administration A success. Otto Reich, who was once the ambassador of Venezuela and was an influential figure in Republican politics, really said that what happened after Grenada for the military and for US Foreign policies, they kind of shook off the Vietnam era malaise, for lack of a better word. And that's why we call this book a Turning Point, because it re established American power, especially hegemony in this part of the world.
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Scott Bertram
And then, John, what are the consequences here after Grenada, what happens next that again leads us toward the fall of the Soviet Union?
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John Bachmann
What happened internally inside the Soviet Union? And we dive into this in the book a little bit as well. I mean, the Soviet Union was being ruled by a gerontocracy of old bureaucrats who didn't really understand modern times. And they were, you know, they Reagan had said, you know, by the time he came into office, the Soviet premiers kept dying on him. And what the message that this sent to the Soviet Union is that the Americans would pick up arms and defend their own people that were in Grenada and they would also, you know, defend territory in their backyard. This also created a bit of a rift between the Cubans and the Soviets. Maurice Bishop, who was the president and the more moderate aspect of the communist inside Grenada, he was very close with Fidel Castro. And Bernard Coward had more connections inside the Kremlin. And it was when Bernard Coward made the decision to assassinate Maurice Bishop, there was, you know, a bit of a rift between Cuba and the Soviet Union and it caused some distrust there. And while the United States was getting stronger, that alliance was weakened a little bit by all of this. And so you start to see the dominoes start to tumble. I mentioned Poland earlier. That was another aspect of that that helped the Reagan administration kind of get the confidence to do operations like Urgent Fury. And then obviously, people started to take notice in some of those Eastern bloc countries that America was back.
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Scott Bertram
John Bachmann, the author of the new book Turning How Reagan Liberated Grenada and Won the Cold War, also an award winning journalist. You can catch him as host of John Bachmann now on newsma. John, thanks for the history lesson inside Turning Point. We appreciate it. Best of luck with the book.
- [18:14]
John Bachmann
All right, Scott, thank you so much.
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Scott Bertram
Up next, Nathan Herring, assistant professor of physics here at Hillsdale College, continues his series on great physicists. This week, more on James Clerk Maxwell. I'm Scott Bertram. This is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.
- [18:39]
Bill Gray
Hi there. It's Bill Gray from Hillsdale College. Before you skip ahead, can I ask you a question or two? If you could teach 50 million Americans one thing, what would it be? Would you teach our great American story that this nation is unique, founded on self government and individual liberty? Maybe you would teach the truth about free enterprise, how hard work and opportunity allow anyone to rise? Or would you teach the gospel and the Christian faith that helps us live good and meaningful lives? At Hillsdale College, we're doing exactly that, teaching the best that's been thought and said. Through our free online courses, K12 programs, Imprimis, podcasts and more, we reach and teach millions every year with the principles of liberty that make America free. And with your help, we can reach even more. Your tax deductible gift today will help us teach millions more people to pursue truth and defend liberty. Just text the word give to 7 1844. You'll get a secure link to make your donation in seconds. That's give to 718 44. Thank you for standing with us. Now back to the show.
- [19:52]
Scott Bertram
Classical music is one of the greatest
- [19:54]
John Bachmann
achievements of Western civilization.
- [19:57]
Dr. Nathan Herring
It took 2,000 years and the work
- [19:59]
John Bachmann
of the greatest philosophical, scientific, political and religious minds to properly tune the piano and make great music possible.
- [20:10]
Dr. Nathan Herring
But classical music can be intimidating.
- [20:13]
John Bachmann
In Hillsdale College's new free online course, the History of Classical Chopin, through Gershwin, you'll learn how to appreciate humanity's greatest musical accomplishments. In the history of classical music, Concert pianist and Hillsdale College distinguished fellow Hyperion Knight explains how music has developed and what distinguishes the greatest musical achievements of Western civilization. To enroll today and secure your spot
- [20:43]
Dr. Nathan Herring
in this completely free online course, visit Hillsdale.
- [20:47]
John Bachmann
Edu Network.
- [20:50]
Dr. Nathan Herring
That's Hillsdale.
- [21:06]
Scott Bertram
Welcome back to the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. I'm Scott Bertram. Be sure to check out the show and more Hillsdale audio at Podcast Hillsdale, Eduardo, or wherever you get your audio, including YouTube. We're joined by Dr. Nathan Herring, assistant professor of physics here at Hillsdale College. Dr. Herring, thanks for joining us.
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Dr. Nathan Herring
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
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Scott Bertram
We continue today our look profiles of great physicists. And today it's James Clerk Maxwell's time in the spotlight. There might be some of our listeners who don't know about James Clerk Maxwell. How would you explain to them briefly why he's one of the giants of physics?
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Dr. Nathan Herring
Yeah. James Clerk Maxwell is inarguably one of the most important physicists in the history of the subject, and particularly when we talk about the 19th century. He is not only one of the fathers of an area of physics called statistical mechanics, he is also a significant proponent of electromagnetic theory. He played an instrumental role in putting electromagnetic theory into its ultimate form. Form. He's Got these four equations called Maxwell's equations. I'm sure we'll dive into them in just a second. But they are appropriately named after him, and for that reason, he is a famous figure in the history of physics.
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Scott Bertram
All right, so you read my mind. What exactly are Maxwell's equations, and why are they such a big deal?
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Dr. Nathan Herring
Yes, so the Maxwell's equations are the four mathematical laws that describe the theory of classical electromagnetism, which is a theory that purports to explain all the electrical and magnetic interactions of matter in two steps. So, first, there are these objects called electric magnetic fields, which fill all of space. You can think of them as these continuous substances that pervade space. And these fields are produced by electrical charges, charges in motion, and just charges distributed in some particular way. They generate these fields, and those fields then in turn exert forces on those charges. And so electromagnetism is the delicate interplay between the forces, sorry, the fields and the charges kind of feeding back on one another. And Maxwell's equations describe how that process works. It's a set of four equations which describe not only how the fields evolve over time, but also space. And they can be used to completely determine the properties of electric and magnetic fields in any. For a set of charges in any configuration, and in principle allow us to understand electromagnetic. All electromagnetic interactions, which are one of the fundamental interactions of contemporary physics. His equations synthesize the work of his predecessors in this area. So figures like Gauss, Ampere, Faraday. In fact, three of the Maxwell equations are named explicitly for those other physicists. So there's Gauss's law, Ampere's law, Faraday's law. And so you can see he's giving credit to those. Those other thinkers. And the final thing I will say about these equations is Maxwell's theory of classical electromagnetism is the first example of a complete field theory in physics, a theory where the dynamical objects are fields. The other fundamental interactions of contemporary physics, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and even gravity. Today we also understand those in terms of field theory. And so particularly in the case of the two nuclear interactions, those effects, the theory that describes them uses equations which are extremely similar to Maxwell's equations. They're like mathematical cousins of Maxwell's equations. And so even outside the area of electricity and magnetism, his influence is still felt.
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Scott Bertram
Maxwell's work help to lay the foundation for modern technology. How might you tell us we're living in Maxwell's world today?
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Dr. Nathan Herring
Absolutely. The way we understand physics today, we believe that the dominant interaction that is at work as the various material constituents of our reality are interacting with each other. The dominant interaction is an electromagnetic one, which means it's described by Maxwell's equations. And by understanding that electromagnetic interaction in greater depth, engineers have been able to develop all sorts of fantastic technologies that completely changed the way we live today. Telecommunications, microwave ovens, electrical power generation and transmission, electronic circuits, X ray imaging, magnetic storage, as in the case of a hard drive, optics, whether it be fiber optics or lasers. These, just to name a few. Basically, almost every piece of technology that you interact with on a daily basis is touched by Maxwell's equations.
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Scott Bertram
Let's talk a bit about Maxwell, the person, as we do on these Profiles, talking with Dr. Nathan Herring from Hillsdale's physics department. What do we know about Maxwell's upbringing, his education that might help to shape his genius?
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Dr. Nathan Herring
Yeah, he had a kind of unusual upbringing. His parents had him later in life. His mother was 40 when he was born, which was extremely uncommon for the 19th century. We know he had an elder sister, but she died in infancy. And his parents were sort of reluctant to have another child. It was a very traumatic experience for them. But eventually they did give birth to James Clerk Maxwell. And so he was effectively raised as an only child. As a youth, he had a great talent for memorization. We know he could recite all of the psalms from memory, as well as many passages of John Milton. His mother, recognizing his intelligence, started tutoring him herself until she passed away due to cancer when he was eight years old. After that, his father tried to take over his teaching, but that didn't go so well. And so he sent him away to Edinburgh Academy, where he finished his education, until then going to the University of Edinburgh for college, followed by some studies at the University of Cambridge. We know that he. While his father wasn't particularly good at teaching him as a child, we do know that he links his scientific curiosity as sort of originating from an experience with his father. His father took him to a demonstration put on by Robert Davidson, the inventor of the electric train. Robert Davidson did these demonstrations for the public on electric propulsion and the magnetic force and that sort of thing. And we. Maxwell says that those demonstrations with his father, seeing those demonstrations with his father, were sort of catalyzing experiences for his scientific curiosity.
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Scott Bertram
Are there any particularly striking, quirky, interesting stories about Maxwell as a student or as a professor?
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Dr. Nathan Herring
Yes, Maxwell was very beloved by his students, but he did have a reputation as being a poor lecturer. His students reported that he was often very disorganized. Showing up to class the last minute. And he had a habit of being kind of a dry, monotonous speaker. There's one account where he wanted to demonstrate to his students the process of phase transition. So our listeners may remember from chemistry that we have these different phases of matter, like solids can turn to liquids and liquids can turn to gases, and so on and so forth. Those are called phase transitions. And he wanted to demonstrate this using water. And so he made his students watch as he attempted to boil a large pot of water. And he had grossly underestimated how much time this was going to take. And so they were just sitting there watching him, and he kept saying, oh, no, I think it's about to happen. Just hang on, hang on. And so he was not the most organized lecturer, I guess. Another quirky story as a student. We know that he was actually very bored during secondary school. He was probably a little too advanced for the education he was receiving. And so he spent a lot of time kind of coming up with his own math problems to work on. At age 14, he wrote his first mathematical paper in which he reproduced, kind of came up on his own with some ideas that Descartes had stumbled upon about more complicated geometric objects, objects that have more foci is the technical term. So the listeners remember maybe an ellipse. An ellipse is a kind of fat circle. From the perspective of geometry. We say that an ellipse has these two focal points in there in the middle, the distance. The sum of the distances from those focal points must be a constant. And if you construct the figure that respects that property, you get an ellipse. So Maxwell was exploring, well, what happens if you have three focal points or four focal points. And he developed the mathematics for that. He did not know, however, that Descartes had already done that centuries earlier, what
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Scott Bertram
scientific virtues most defined Maxwell. What made him different than other thinkers of his time?
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Dr. Nathan Herring
That's a great question. I would say two things. First, the pursuit of unity. Maxwell was very well studied in many disparate areas of physics. Optics, electricity, magnetism, fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, mechanics. These sort of different arenas where one could devote their entire life to studying, have a scientific career, just one of those areas. Maxwell sort of dabbled in all of them, and he really was searching for a kind of syntopical, unified understanding of all these different subjects. And so he particularly liked to work on research questions that were at the intersections of these different domains, trying to find ways to bring them together. The second virtue, I would say, is his mathematical Creativity. Maxwell was probably the most mathematically inventive physicist of the second half of the 19th century. He was able to draw mathematical analogies between different areas of physics and science. He could take two different problems that were about physically very different scenarios and find a way to find a sort of a mathematical bridge between them. He could translate those problems into the language of mathematics and then say, see, these are actually described by similar equations. So I can leverage my intuition from one problem as I then apply it to the other problem. And that made him a very productive researcher. It allowed him to construct equations that used mathematics that were conceptually way ahead of, of his time.
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Scott Bertram
Speaking of stories, is there an interesting story behind how Maxwell figured out that light is an electromagnetic wave?
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Dr. Nathan Herring
Yes, this is a remarkable prediction of Maxwell's equations, something he did not set out to do initially. But his equations are sort of pregnant with the idea of light being an electromagnetic wave. And so the way that works is if you take his four equations, and he did this himself, if you take his equations and apply certain limits, the equations can kind of be combined and they can be substituted into one another. And when you do this, what you obtain at the end is the wave equation, which is an equation known to physicists in Maxwell's time, actually for many decades at that point. And this wave equation describes the propagation of a wave moving through space. And every wave equation has a term in it that reflects the speed of that wave. So wave is a periodic disturbance that transmits energy through space. And these waves propagate. Waves propagate at a speed. And so he could read off what would be the speed of this electromagnetic wave. And it had the speed, you know, he calculated what would the speed of this wave be. And it was. It matched the then measured speed of light. People already had measured what the speed of light was. And here he was saying that electromagnetic waves propagate the speed of light. And so he had the kind of courage to say, I actually think what's going on here is all light is electromagnetic waves. And moreover, his equations predicted that there should be a vast range of possible electromagnetic waves which had not yet been detected. Well, later, in 1887, Heinrich Hertz produced the first radio waves using the ideas of Maxwell's equations. And they had these radio waves had all of the properties as predicted by Maxwell, and thus were discovered to be a new, longer form, longer wavelength form of light. So we have infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, so on and so forth. And now radio waves.
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Scott Bertram
Talking with Dr. Nathan Herring from Hillsdale's physics department about the great physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Did Maxwell's ideas help to pave the way for relativity and quantum theory?
- [33:26]
Dr. Nathan Herring
Absolutely. Maxwell's equations later, not during his time, but later on, Maxwell's equations were discovered to have a very important mathematical symmetry. So a symmetry. In mathematics, a symmetry is a transformation, an operation you can do on something, and it leaves it unchanged. So if you imagine an equilateral triangle, a triangle with three sides of the same length, you can rotate that triangle sufficiently and it will look the exact same right. Object with perfect sort of symmetry of this kind is a circle, right? You can rotate a circle by any number of degrees, and it looks exactly the same. So we can do these kind. Those are called symmetry transformations, and we can do those transformations to equations as well. And it was discovered that Maxwell's equations have a very particular symmetry transformation. The mathematician who discovered this is named Lorentz. And so we call this Lorentz invariance. Interestingly, the other laws of physics at that time, the most important of which would have been Newton's laws, did not have this symmetry. That was kind of curious. What is the importance of this Lorentz invariance? Additionally, we talked about how Maxwell's equations predict that there should be electromagnetic waves that propagate at the speed of light. One of the subtleties of that, though, is when you. When you do that calculation, the speed is given to you, the speed of the wave is given to you without any particular reference to some observer. And why is this important? Well, because in classical physics, we know that velocity, and therefore speed is relative. You and I are sitting in this studio right now, and relative to me, you seem to be at rest. But we know that relative to some observer sitting outside the Earth, imagine there's someone floating out, you know, maybe on the International Space Station, watching us. They would see that we are actually rotating right now around the center of the Earth. And moreover, our planet is hurtling around the Sun. So velocity is relative. And yet Maxwell's equations say, here's the speed of light without any context. So immediately, physicists, as they started to mull this over, were like, well, this speed must be relative to something. And so they imagined that there would be this material that filled all of space called the ether. And they said, what must be going on is Maxwell's equations are giving us the speed of light relative to the aether. But the Earth is moving through space, as we just discussed. And so the Earth is moving through that ether. And so we should be able to see that effect on the propagation of light. And so they looked for this for many decades and never found it. So why is this important? Well, later on in the early 20th century, in 1905, Albert Einstein is going to use these two ideas. The constancy of the speed of light, the idea that the speed of light is the same for everyone, no matter what, and Lorentz invariance. Those two ideas are going to be the basic principles that he uses to build a new form of physics called the relativistic physics, or as we refer to it today, the theory of special relativity. So it's absolutely instrumental Maxwell's equations to the birth of relativity. And the final thing I will say you brought up quantum mechanics. There is a phenomenon called black body radiation which our observers are actually familiar with. If you heat something up in a fire, you'll notice that it eventually take a piece of metal, stick it in the fire, you'll notice it starts to glow and produce light. That light is called blackbody radiation. And physicists were aware of this and they were trying to predict the distribution of light produced by hot objects. And using the physics of the time, using Maxwell's equations, they predicted that that light should be. The distribution of light should be such that you produce an infinite amount of ultraviolet radiation. This is called the ultraviolet catastrophe. This is patently not what happens for us because you don't produce an infinite amount of ultraviolet radiation when you heat up a piece of metal. If you did, every time you opened your oven, you would vaporize the whole house. So there's something wrong there. And that was ultimately solved. That mystery was resolved by Max Planck through something called the quantization condition. And that's the birth of quantum mechanics. So Maxwell's equations play an instrumental role in both relativity and quantum mechanics.
- [37:31]
Scott Bertram
So Einstein once said the work of Maxwell was the most profound, the most fruitful that physics had seen since Newton. Given that praise, given what we know about Maxwell, his contributions, why isn't he more of a household name?
- [37:46]
Dr. Nathan Herring
Yeah, this is a great question. Our listeners know about Einstein, they've probably heard about Newton. We've talked on this program about Michael Faraday and they've probably even heard about that. The idea of a Faraday cage may be familiar to them. Why not Maxwell? Why is he not more famous given all of, we've, you know, the importance of the work he's done? Well, Maxwell was not very good at self promotion. He was an extremely humble person. When I teach a class here at Hillsdale College called physics 100 great principles of Physics, one of the things I have my students do is read this inaugural lecture by Maxwell. He's giving this lecture to a bunch of physics students in his time, and he's talking about important work that's going on. And he spends a lot of time talking about the work of another physicist named Lord Kelvin, about his work on atoms. And then at the end of the lecture, he says, oh, also there have been some investigations into electromagnetic phenomena that seem very promising. And there he's talking about himself and he's referring to Maxwell's equations as extremely important work, but he's underselling it. So he was not very good at taking credit, promoting the things he had done and taking credit for it. So we had to rely on other physicists to sort of evangelize the theory for him. Moreover, his great work was expressed in a very difficult mathematical form, and so most physicists of his time really couldn't follow very carefully what he was doing. It took a later generation, people like Olivier Heaviside, Josiah Gibbs, Herman von Helmholtz, to sort of understand his theory and promulgate it to the rest of the physics community. And by that time, we're already entering the very late 19th century. And so we have other revolutionary figures like Planck, Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein. They're already on the horizon. So because of that, Maxwell kind of got missed his moment, so to say. And then I would say, even in their modern form, Maxwell's equations are just not as pithy as F equals MA or E equals MC squared. So it's just hard to talk about and appreciate the work of Maxwell if you haven't studied a little bit of advanced mathematics or going to make the effort at least to try to get more in touch with how physicists think about these phenomena.
- [40:00]
Scott Bertram
Dr. Nathan Herring, Assistant professor of physics here at Hillsdale College, as we talk about these great physicists, including James Clerk Maxwell.
- [40:09]
Dr. Nathan Herring
Dr.
- [40:09]
Scott Bertram
Herring, thanks for joining us here on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.
- [40:13]
Dr. Nathan Herring
Thank you.
- [40:13]
Scott Bertram
That will wrap up this edition of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Our thanks to John Bachmann of Newsmax. His brand new book is Turning How Reagan Liberated Grenada and Won the Cold War. And also thanks to Nathan Herring from Hillsdale's physics department. Remember, you can hear new episodes every week on this station. You also can find extended versions of some of our interviews or listen anytime to the podcast. Find it at podcast Hillsdale. Edu or wherever you get your audio. Until next week.
- [40:44]
Dr. Nathan Herring
Week.
- [40:44]
Scott Bertram
I'm Scott Bertram, and this has been the Radio Free Hillsdale Power.