[HN Gopher] Oliver Heaviside (1850-1925) - Physical Mathematicia...
___________________________________________________________________
Oliver Heaviside (1850-1925) - Physical Mathematician (1983)
Author : agnosticmantis
Score : 91 points
Date : 2021-04-09 14:48 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sci-hub.se)
(TXT) w3m dump (sci-hub.se)
| OnlyOneCannolo wrote:
| I love how the Heaviside function looks the way it sounds.
|
| ____----
| jhallenworld wrote:
| Also:
|
| "Coaxial cable was used in the first (1858) and following
| transatlantic cable installations, but its theory wasn't
| described until 1880 by English physicist, engineer, and
| mathematician Oliver Heaviside, who patented the design in that
| year (British patent No. 1,407)."
|
| https://lemmatalogic.com/HeavisideUKPatent1407.pdf
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Anyone who has seen the musical _Cats_ has heard Heaviside 's
| name. The Jellicle Cats sing of ascending "up up up to the
| Heaviside Layer."
|
| https://catsmusical.fandom.com/wiki/Heaviside_Layer
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennelly%E2%80%93Heaviside_lay...
| devindotcom wrote:
| I read lately that the Heaviside layer (Kennelly-Heaviside
| properly) of the atmosphere, composed of ionized gases, was used
| for years to bounce radio transmissions off of, allowing them to
| "skip" multiple times occasionally and travel thousands of miles.
| It was seasonal and unpredictable on a short term basis so using
| it seems to have been about equal parts luck, skill, and art.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennelly%E2%80%93Heaviside_lay...
| afturkrull wrote:
| > I read lately that the Heaviside layer .. was seasonal and
| unpredictable on a short term basis so using it seems to have
| been about equal parts luck, skill, and art.
|
| It was a lot more useful than that. Before the advent of
| satellites, shortwave radio was used extensively to commuicate
| with her Majesties far-flung colonies.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_World_Service
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Shortwave radio was great in its day. I used to spend many
| hours a day listening to international shortwave broadcasts,
| and talking with other amateur radio operators.
|
| One day about 20 years ago I was driving through San Jose and
| happened to tune in to North Korea radio on the shortwave
| receiver I had installed in my car, and heard this news gem:
|
| "Scientists are studying the brain of Respected Comrade Kim
| Jong-Il, because the Respected Comrade is capable of feats of
| mental power beyond the ability of ordinary human beings."
|
| Even today, shortwave is making a bit of a comeback thanks to
| High Frequency Trading:
|
| https://hackaday.com/2018/05/12/hft-on-hf-you-cant-beat-it-f...
|
| https://swling.com/blog/2018/05/mystery-traders-using-shortw...
| bjornsing wrote:
| "Safari cannot open the page because the server could not be
| found."
|
| Is this somehow blocked in Sweden? I'm on a Telia FTTH line in
| Malmo.
| gwern wrote:
| Mirror: https://www.gwern.net/docs/science/1983-edge.pdf
| alfla wrote:
| hmm, could be dns blocking by your ISP. Try changing your DNS
| server to 8.8.8.8 (Google)
| mhh__ wrote:
| He's buried near where I live, I've been meaning to go on a
| pilgrimage
| rrss wrote:
| I will always upvote Heaviside. This man is responsible for most
| of the foundation of electrical engineering as it exists today
| (via and refined by others, especially those at Bell Labs who
| recognized the importance of his work). Unfortunately, in my
| experience, most electrical engineers only know his name as a
| reference to the step function.
| [deleted]
| zwieback wrote:
| MEs as well, step function for beam bending. I vaguely remember
| his name coming up in controls as well where Laplace is
| popular.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| Heaviside (partial fraction) expansion I think:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaviside_cover-up_method
| mhh__ wrote:
| The Heaviside step function probably
| analog31 wrote:
| I think it's great that the function named after him has a
| heavy side.
| isitdopamine wrote:
| I'll leave this here:
|
| https://me.me/i/barber-what-do-you-want-heaviside-you-
| heard-...
| ISO-morphism wrote:
| > step function
|
| As mentioned in the article he wasn't well accepted by
| academics of the time. A college math professor of mine
| remarked that the acceptance of naming the step function after
| him was intentionally demeaning to the rest of his work.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Yeah, right. ;-) But ultimately those who demeaned Heaviside
| weren't that successful given that most of his electrical
| nomenclature has actually stood the test of time and is still
| used today. It's worth quoting Wiki's list
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside):
|
| _" Electromagnetic terms
|
| Heaviside coined the following terms of art in
| electromagnetic theory:
|
| * admittance (reciprocal of impedance) (December 1887);
|
| * elastance (reciprocal of permittance, reciprocal of
| capacitance) (1886);
|
| * conductance (real part of admittance, reciprocal of
| resistance) (September 1885);
|
| * electret for the electric analogue of a permanent magnet,
| or, in other words, any substance that exhibits a quasi-
| permanent electric polarization (e.g. ferroelectric);
|
| * impedance (July 1886);
|
| * inductance (February 1886);
|
| * permeability (September 1885);
|
| * permittance (now called capacitance) and permittivity (June
| 1887);
|
| * reluctance (May 1888)."_
|
| Methinks that's more than anyone else has done!
| madengr wrote:
| Interesting. I've been doing RF engineering for 25 years
| and have never read of permittence and elastance. We
| usually call it inductive and capacitive susceptance. But
| yeah, Heaviside did a ton of stuff; I read that
| aforementioned biography.
| tigerlily wrote:
| So what did the college professor think of the Dirac delta
| function?
| afturkrull wrote:
| There's also the "Heaviside Layer" responsible for shortwave
| radio communication. Heaviside did go a little eccentric in his
| later years and moved granite furniture into his house.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Dagnammit - sci-hub.se is blocked by VirginMedia in the UK
| mhh__ wrote:
| What vital work they do
| CliffStoll wrote:
| Wonderful note about a most important mathematical physicist.
|
| Unmentioned is his stumble in relativity theory: As Paul Nahin
| wrote,
|
| Despite the 'Einsteinian look' of Heaviside's speed-dependent
| terms, his analysis was greatly lacking when compared with
| Einstein's. Heaviside started with moving charged matter and then
| applied some heavy mathematics to Maxwell's electrodynamics,
| while Einstein used nothing but the fundamental ideas of space
| and time, some simple algebra, and the two relativity principles
| (all physical laws look the same in all inertial frames, and
| observers in different inertial frames will measure the same
| value for the speed of light). Einstein's analysis is free of any
| special assumptions concerning electricity in particular and the
| nature of matter in general: to put it bluntly, Einstein saw the
| whole forest, while Heaviside and Thomson were looking through a
| magnifying glass at the bark on a single tree.
|
| https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2017.044...
| bsder wrote:
| > Einstein saw the whole forest, while Heaviside and Thomson
| were looking through a magnifying glass at the bark on a single
| tree.
|
| That's an incorrect characterization.
|
| Heaviside is pre-Michelson-Morley. Einstein is post.
|
| The fact that "Ether doesn't exist. Electromagnetic waves
| simply transmit without a medium." is a _VERY VERY VERY_ big
| change in the fundamentals of physics.
|
| That opened the door for the _hypothesis_ that "all physical
| laws look the same in all inertial frames" because without
| "Ether" you cannot anoint a _preferred_ inertial frame. The
| Michelson-Morley experiment was the first test of that
| hypothesis.
|
| And, to be fair, the kind of fields interpretation that
| Einstein championed has weaknesses:
|
| 1) It's an absolute bear to compute--the Heaviside-Hertz
| formulations lend themselves to engineering much better pre-
| computers.
|
| 2) It had severe experimental holes--at the time.
|
| For example, the Einstein fields interpretation makes the
| prediction that an an excited electron in an atom will never
| decay. That, of course, was nonsense--excited atoms always
| decay to ground state. Except--now that we can isolate single
| atoms we absolutely see that single atoms _don 't_ decay--only
| the ensemble interactions cause them to decay.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Oliver Heaviside is very often underrated and forgotten and he
| deserves not to be--even his reformulation of Maxwell's
| equations into the four that we know and commonly use today
| alone ought to have him receive better history/recognition in
| the textbooks. This is probably because he was an outsider to
| the physics and electrical engineering establishment and he
| wasn't known to make friends easily, and he didn't abide fools
| well.
|
| Whilst CliffStoll's quote (and link) is from Paul J. Nahin's
| article in the Royal Society journal it's also worth
| highlighting the fact that Nahin has written a full bio on
| Heaviside (it's mentioned in the article's footnotes but might
| be overlooked). I have a copy of the book, it is excellent,
| it's likely the most comprehensive and authoritative written on
| Heaviside, and I'd thoroughly recommend it: _Oliver Heaviside-
| The Life, Work, & Times of an Electrical Genius of the
| Victorian Age; Paul J. Nahin PJ (c)1988-IEEE (c)2002-John
| Hopkins Uni, ISBN 0-8018-6909-9 paperback ed._
|
| It's all very well to praise Heaviside but if one really wants
| to get a feel for the extent and depth of his work then I refer
| one to the following works of his that are on the Internet
| Archive (they're out of copyright so they can be downloaded).
| Note, as with many works, the Internet Archive has multiple
| copies some of which are more readable (or better scanned) than
| others, so the seemingly multiple entries are not duplicates.
| Two other points to note, this list is not comprehensive and
| the IA's file-naming conventions are sometimes skewed or
| confusing (apologies if I've made any typos):
|
| Electromagnetic Theory, Volume-1, Heaviside, Oliver, 1850-1925,
| 1893 edition:
| https://archive.org/details/electromagnetic00heavgoog
|
| Electromagnetic Theory, Volume-1, Heaviside, Oliver, 1850-1925,
| 1894/1912 ed.:
| https://archive.org/details/electromagnetict01heavrich
|
| Electromagnetic Theory, Volume-2, Heaviside, Oliver, 1850-1925,
| 1894/1912 ed.:
| https://archive.org/details/electromagnetict02heavrich
|
| Electromagnetic Theory, Volume-3, Heaviside, Oliver, 1850-1925,
| 1893 ed.:
| https://archive.org/details/electromagnetict03heavuoft
|
| Electrical Papers, Volume-1, Heaviside, Oliver, 1850-1925, 1892
| ed.: https://archive.org/details/electricalpapers01heavuoft
|
| Electrical Papers, Volume-2, Heaviside, Oliver, 1850-1925, 1894
| ed.: https://archive.org/details/electricalpaper01heavgoog
|
| Electrical Papers, Volume-2, Heaviside, Oliver, 1850-1925, 1894
| ed.: https://archive.org/details/electricalpapers02heavrich
|
| Electromagnetic Waves, Heaviside, Oliver, 1850-1925, 1889 ed.:
| https://archive.org/details/electromagnetic01heavgoog
| sprash wrote:
| Interestingly the 4 "Maxwell" Equations as we know them today in
| its algebraic form are actually developed by Heaviside. The
| original 12 Maxwell equations containing ugly complex calculus
| expressions are far less elegant and unintuitive.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| In doing so he left out some interesting physics, though.
| amelius wrote:
| Could you please provide a link?
| vecter wrote:
| Can you explain?
| dboreham wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity ?
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Could also be this -
| https://www.ams.org/notices/201410/rnoti-p1186.pdf
| billfruit wrote:
| Also did have a role in popularizing the the usage of vectors
| or was it someone else?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-04-09 23:00 UTC)