A Quote by Albert Einstein

What lead me more or less directly to the special theory of relativity was the conviction that the electromotive force acting on a body in motion in a magnetic field was nothing else but an electric field.

Albert Einstein

Quote Topics

Acting Body Conviction Directly Electric Else Field Force Lead Less Magnetic Me More More Or Less Motion Nothing Relativity Special Theory

Quote Author

Albert Einstein
German - Physicist
March 14, 1879 - April 18, 1955

According to well-known electrodynamic laws, an electron moving in a magnetic field is acted upon by a force which runs perpendicular to the direction of motion of the electron and to the direction of the magnetic field, and whose magnitude is easily determined.

Pieter Zeeman

In the absence of a magnetic field the period of all these oscillations is the same. But as soon as the electron is exposed to the effect of a magnetic field, its motion changes.

Pieter Zeeman

The theory I propose may therefore be called a theory of the Electromagnetic Field because it has to do with the space in the neighbourhood of the electric or magnetic bodies, and it may be called a Dynamical Theory, because it assumes that in the space there is matter in motion, by which the observed electromagnetic phenomena are produced.

James Clerk Maxwell

The special theory of relativity owes its origins to Maxwell's equations of the electromagnetic field.

Albert Einstein

It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature.

John von Neumann

Does the engineer ever predict the acceleration of a given body from a knowledge of its mass and of the forces acting upon it? Of course. Does the chemist ever measure the mass of an atom by measuring its acceleration in a given field of force? Yes. Does the physicist ever determine the strength of a field by measuring the acceleration of a known mass in that field? Certainly. Why then, should any one of these roles be singled out as the role of Newton's second law of motion? The fact is that it has a variety of roles.

Brian Ellis

My opinion about Miller's experiments is the following. ... Should the positive result be confirmed, then the special theory of relativity and with it the general theory of relativity, in its current form, would be invalid. Experimentum summus judex. Only the equivalence of inertia and gravitation would remain, however, they would have to lead to a significantly different theory.

Albert Einstein

I like to call it the scalar boson because this reflects an essential component of the theory - it means that the field the boson travels through has no preferred direction, unlike the way a magnetic field does.

Francois Englert

When I was at Berkeley, the framework of quantum field theory could calculate the dynamics of electromagnetism. It could roughly describe the motion of the weak nuclear force, radiation. But it hit a brick wall with the strong interaction, the binding force.

David Gross

I would not give my rotating field discovery for a thousand inventions, however valuable... A thousand years hence, the telephone and the motion picture camera may be obsolete, but the principle of the rotating magnetic field will remain a vital, living thing for all time to come.

Nikola Tesla

We went to the moon using just Newton's laws of motion and gravity. Newtonian dynamics we call it. So then we find out, "Well, this works because there's certain regimes we've never tested it in." Had we done so, we would show that it didn't work: For example, at very high speeds, very high gravity, Newton's laws fail. They just fail. You need Einstein's laws of motion and gravity. Those would be his special theory of relativity and general theory of relativity. Now you invoke those and it works.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

What, then, is light according to the electromagnetic theory? It consists of alternate and opposite rapidly recurring transverse magnetic disturbances, accompanied with electric displacements, the direction of the electric displacement being at the right angles to the magnetic disturbance, and both at right angles to the direction of the ray.

James Clerk Maxwell

Electric and magnetic forces. May they live for ever, and never be forgot, if only to remind us that the science of electromagnetics, in spite of the abstract nature of its theory, involving quantities whose nature is entirely unknown at the present, is really and truly founded on the observations of real Newtonian forces, electric and magnetic respectively.

Oliver Heaviside

Whatever is in your magnetic field is attracting to itself, and so the more love in your field, the more power you have to attract the things you love.