200 Years of Electromagnetism event now online
The Institute of Physics event on 16 September 2020 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Hans-Christian Oersted's seminal paper on electromagnetism will now be held as a webinar. In July 1820, Hans Christian Oersted (1777-1851) of the University of Copenhagen published a four-page text “Experiments on the effect of the electric conflict on the magnetic needle”. He had discovered that a wire carrying an electric current generated by a Voltaic pile affected the orientation of a nearby compass needle and in particular that the effect circulated outside the wire in the plane perpendicular to it. Within months, André-Marie Ampère (1775-1836) had extended Oersted’s work by experiment and mathematics. Ampère published his magnum opus on electrodynamics in 1826/1827, establishing himself, according…