Chapter 570 Witness the Miracle! (Part 2)_3

Of course.

This article wasn’t some inspirational mush published in Reader’s Digest or Yi Lin.

But actually a short essay serialized in a type of school newspaper Xu Yun often came across during his student years.

That kind of paper cost about fifty bucks per semester, with 90% of space filled with various kinds of questions. Sometimes, though, there were articles tucked away in the corners.

The school paper and another book called Current Affairs were pretty much the rare channels Xu Yun had back then to access news from society while at school.

No idea if, after almost twenty years, these things still exist.

Anyway.

In Faraday’s Regret,

The author wrote that Faraday didn’t receive a good education, had poor language skills, and his papers were hard to understand.

So his series of major discoveries didn’t cause much of a stir at the time.

Wheat, though, had received excellent schooling, so he managed to summarize and discover electromagnetic waves.

The article rambled a bunch, before ending with this conclusion:

[Elementary and middle school are times to learn knowledge and build foundations—you should study every subject well. Among them, language class is the foundation and tool for all learning; it’s not something to ignore. Don’t repeat Faraday’s regret.]

Xu Yun didn’t think much of it back then, since he was only in high school and didn’t really know Faraday’s life story.

But when he got to university and learned the history of physics, he realized—what the hell is this nonsense?

Faraday was practically worshipped while alive; he invented generators, the soul of the Second Industrial Revolution—how could anyone ever overlook him?

Instead, Wheat only shone a bit while at University of Cambridge, and afterwards his life was pretty rough.

And if we’re talking about being hard to understand, Maxwell’s Equations are way, way more confusing than Faraday’s magnetic lines ever were.....

Not to mention, Xu Yun later read a scanned English version of Faraday’s papers—even by nineteenth-century standards, they weren’t that hard to grasp.

On the other hand, though—

Even though Faraday probably never felt it himself, from a modern God’s-eye view, electromagnetic waves are basically the biggest regret of his career.

With all his research, Faraday totally had the ability to mathematically derive electromagnetic waves.

Like Newman’s Vector Potential, which he proposed in 1845—take the law for magnetic fields, apply the curl, and you’ve got the static magnetism equation’s approximation.

That’s already really, really close to electromagnetic waves.

Plus, in some of Faraday’s letters, future generations can spot his guesses about electromagnetic waves.

For example, in a letter from 1865 to Weber, Faraday wrote:

"...Maybe in the space between two conductors carrying current, where our eyes can’t see, there’s some unknown force transmitting and interacting."

Too bad Faraday was always bad at math, so predicting electromagnetic waves via mathematical derivation became Wheat’s achievement, later proven by Hertz.

So, from Xu Yun’s perspective—

Faraday missing the discovery of electromagnetic waves is actually kind of sad, even unfair.

After all, electromagnetic waves are basically the heart of electromagnetism.

It’s like a marine biologist who spends his life studying blue whales—knows everything about their migration routes, calls, habits—

But because deep-diving tech wasn’t advanced, he never saw a real blue whale fall, only plenty of shark falls.

That’s obviously a regret.

So even though Xu Yun’s mission target this time is Wheat, after hesitating for a long while, he still decided to lift the ’seal’ on electromagnetic waves.

That’s also the root of his sense of debt toward Wheat and Hertz, as mentioned earlier.

A while later—

Faraday and the others finally calmed down, and started pondering other questions.

You could see him stare for a few seconds at the expression Wheat had derived, his brows slightly furrowed, turning to Xu Yun:

"Luo Feng, even though you proved mathematically that waves exist in the electric and magnetic fields, physics and math aren’t really the same thing."

"If something only exists mathematically, at most it can be called a prediction."

"To really confirm its existence, you gotta show something visible with the naked ey—wait!"

He didn’t finish his sentence, suddenly realizing something.

His gaze locked hard onto Xu Yun, his handsome old face showing a faint hint of excitement as he asked:

"Luo Feng, you said you have two things to do today—first is the derivation, second is the experiment."

"Is that experiment about..."

Xu Yun nodded at him gently, speaking slowly and confidently:

"That’s right. What we’re about to do is..."

"Catch the wave inside the electromagnetic field!"

.......