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BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
Oersted Hans Christian. Biography of a scientist
Directory / Biographies of great scientists
"Scientific Danish physicist, professor," wrote Ampere, - with his great discovery paved a new path of research for physicists. These studies have not remained fruitless; they attracted to the discovery of many facts worthy of the attention of all who are interested in progress. Hans Christian Oersted was born on August 14, 1777 on the Danish island of Langeland in the town of Rydkobing in the family of a poor pharmacist. The family was constantly in need, so the brothers Hans Christian and Anders had to receive primary education wherever they could: the city barber taught them German, his wife taught them Danish, the pastor of a small church taught them grammar rules, introduced them to history and literature, the surveyor taught them addition and subtraction, and a visiting student for the first time told them amazing things about the properties of minerals, sowed curiosity and taught them to love the aroma of mystery. Already at the age of twelve, Hans was forced to stand behind the counter of his father's pharmacy. Here medicine captivated him for a long time, displacing chemistry, history, literature, and further strengthened his confidence in his scientific mission. He decides to enter the University of Copenhagen, but is still obsessed with doubts: what to study? He takes on everything - medicine, physics, astronomy, philosophy, poetry. Hans was happy within the walls of the university. The scientist later wrote that in order for a young man to be absolutely free, he must enjoy in the great realm of thought and imagination, where there is struggle, where there is freedom of expression, where the vanquished is given the right to rise up and fight again. He lived, reveling in difficulties and his first small victories, the acquisition of new truths and the elimination of previous mistakes. What he just did not do. The gold medal of the university in 1797 was awarded to him for his essay "The Limits of Poetry and Prose". His next work, also highly regarded, dealt with the properties of alkalis, and the dissertation for which he received the title of Doctor of Philosophy was devoted to medicine. He scattered and, it seemed, put an end to his scientific career in advance, preferring versatility to professionalism. The nineteenth century announced itself with a new way of life and thought, new social and political ideas, a new philosophy, a new perception of art and literature. All this captures Hans. He strives to get to where life is seething, where the main scientific and philosophical issues are being resolved - to Germany, France, and other European countries. Denmark, of course, was in this sense a European province. Oersted did not want and could not stay there. At twenty, Oersted received a degree in pharmacy, and at twenty-two, a Ph.D. Having brilliantly defended his dissertation, Hans goes to the university for an internship in France, Germany, Holland. There, Oersted listened to lectures on the possibilities of studying physical phenomena with the help of poetry, on the connection between physics and mythology. He liked the lectures of the philosophers who shone from the stands, but he could never agree with them in refusing the experimental study of physical phenomena. He was struck by Schelling, as Hegel had earlier struck him, and, above all, by Schelling's idea of the universal connection of phenomena. Oersted saw in it the justification and meaning of his apparent scatteredness - everything he studied turned out to be interconnected and interdependent according to this philosophy. He became obsessed with the idea of connecting everything to everything. A kindred spirit was quickly found, thinking the same way as he, just as scattered and romantic. It was the German physicist Ritter, the inventor of the battery, a brilliant visionary, a generator of crazy ideas. For example, he "calculated" (based on purely astronomical considerations) that the era of new discoveries in the field of electricity would come in 1819 or 1820. And this prediction really came true: the discovery took place in 1820, Oersted made it, but Ritter did not have to be a witness - he died ten years before. In 1806 Oersted became a professor at the University of Copenhagen. Fascinated by the philosophy of Schelling, he thought a lot about the relationship between heat, light, electricity and magnetism. In 1813, his work "Investigations into the Identity of Chemical and Electrical Forces" was published in France. In it, he first expresses the idea of a connection between electricity and magnetism. He writes: "You should try to see if electricity ... produces any action on the magnet ..." His considerations were simple: electricity gives rise to light - a spark, sound - crackling, and finally, it can produce heat - the wire closing the clamps of the current source heats up . Can't electricity produce magnetic actions? They say that Oersted did not part with the magnet. That piece of iron must have continually made him think in that direction. The idea of the connection between electricity and magnetism, which goes back to the simplest similarity between the attraction of fluffs by amber and iron filings by a magnet, was in the air, and many of the best minds of Europe were carried away by it. Today, any schoolchild can easily reproduce Oersted's experiment, demonstrate a "vortex of electrical conflict" by pouring iron filings on cardboard, through the center of which a current-carrying wire passes. But it was not easy to detect the magnetic effects of the current. The Russian physicist Petrov tried to detect them by connecting the poles of his battery with iron and steel plates. He did not find any magnetization of the plates after a few hours of running current through them. There is information about other observations, but it is known with full certainty that the magnetic effects of the current were observed and described by Oersted. On February 15, 1820, Oersted, already emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of Copenhagen, gave a lecture to his students. The lecture was accompanied by demonstrations. On the laboratory table were a current source, a wire that closed its clamps, and a compass. At the time when Oersted closed the circuit, the compass needle flinched and turned. When the circuit was opened, the arrow returned back. This was the first experimental confirmation of the connection between electricity and magnetism, something that many scientists have been looking for for so long. It would seem that everything is clear. Oersted showed the students another confirmation of the long-standing idea of the universal connection of phenomena. But why are there doubts? Why did so much controversy subsequently flare up around the circumstances of this event? The fact is that the students who attended the lecture later told something completely different. According to them, Oersted wanted to demonstrate at the lecture only an interesting property of electricity to heat the wire, and the compass ended up on the table quite by accident. And it was by chance that they explained that the compass lay next to this wire, and quite by chance, in their opinion, one of the sharp-sighted students drew attention to the turning arrow, and the surprise and delight of the professor, according to them, were genuine. Oersted himself, in his later works, wrote: “All those present in the audience were witnesses to the fact that I had announced the result of the experiment in advance. The discovery, therefore, was not an accident, as Professor Hilbert would like to conclude from those expressions that I used when I first announced about opening." Is it a coincidence that it was Oersted who made the discovery? After all, a happy combination of the necessary instruments, their mutual arrangement and "modes of operation" could be obtained in any laboratory? Yes it is. But in this case, randomness is natural - Oersted was among the then few researchers studying the connections between phenomena. However, it is worth returning to the essence of Oersted's discovery. It must be said that the deviation of the compass needle in the lecture experiment was very small. In July 1820, Oersted repeated the experiment again, using more powerful batteries of current sources. Now the effect became much stronger, and the stronger, the thicker the wire with which he closed the battery contacts. In addition, he found out one strange thing that does not fit into Newton's ideas about action and reaction. The force acting between the magnet and the wire was not directed along the straight line connecting them, but perpendicular to it. In Oersted's words, "the magnetic effect of an electric current has a circular motion around it." The magnetic needle never pointed to the wire, but was always directed tangentially to the circles encircling this wire. It was as if invisible clots of magnetic forces swirled around the wire, drawing a light compass needle. That's what amazed the scientist. That is why in his four-page "pamphlet" he, fearing distrust and ridicule, carefully enumerates the witnesses, not forgetting to mention any of their scientific merits. Oersted, giving, in general, an incorrect theoretical interpretation of the experiment, planted a deep thought about the vortex nature of electromagnetic phenomena. He wrote: "In addition, from the observations made, it can be concluded that this conflict forms a vortex around the wire." In other words, magnetic lines of force surround a conductor with current, or electric current is a vortex of a magnetic field. This is the content of the first basic law of electrodynamics, and this is the essence of the discovery of the scientist. Oersted's experience proved not only the connection between electricity and magnetism. What was revealed to him was a new mystery that did not fit into the framework of known laws. Oersted's memoir was published on July 21, 1820. Further events developed at a very unusual pace for the then leisurely science. A few days later, the memoir appeared in Geneva, where Arago was visiting at that time. The very first acquaintance with Oersted's experience proved to him that the answer had been found to the problem that he and many others had struggled with. The impression of the experiments was so great that one of those present at the demonstration stood up and excitedly uttered the phrase that later became famous: "Gentlemen, there is a revolution!" Arago returns to Paris shocked. At the very first meeting of the academy, which he attended immediately upon his return, on September 4, 1820, he makes an oral report on Oersted's experiments. The notes made in the academic journal by the lazy hand of the recorder testify that the academicians asked Arago already at the next meeting, on September 22, to show all those present Oersted's experience, as they say, "in full size." Academician Ampère listened to Arago's message with special attention. He, perhaps, felt at that moment that the time had come for him, in the face of the whole world, to take the baton of discovery from the hands of Oersted. He had been waiting for this hour for a long time - about twenty years, like Arago and like Oersted. And then the hour struck - on September 4, 1820, Ampère realized that he had to act. In just two weeks, he announced the results of his research to the world. He expressed a brilliant idea and managed to confirm it experimentally - all magnetic phenomena can be reduced to electrical ones. This is how a new science was born - electrodynamics, theoretically connecting electrical and magnetic phenomena. Forty years later, electrodynamics became an integral part of Maxwell's electromagnetic field theory, which is still our compass in the world of all electromagnetic phenomena. After the opening, honors fell on Oersted like from a cornucopia. He was elected a member of many of the most authoritative scientific societies: the Royal Society of London and the Paris Academy. The British awarded him a medal for scientific merit, and from France he received a prize of three thousand gold francs, once appointed by Napoleon for the authors of the largest discoveries in the field of electricity. In 1821 Oersted was one of the first to suggest that light is an electromagnetic phenomenon. In 1822-1823, independently of J. Fourier, he rediscovered the thermoelectric effect and built the first thermoelement. Oersted experimentally studied the compressibility and elasticity of liquids and gases, invented the piezometer. The scientist conducted research on acoustics, in particular, he tried to detect the occurrence of electrical phenomena due to air. In 1830, Oersted became an honorary member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Accepting all the new honors, Oersted does not forget that the new century requires a new approach to teaching science. He founds in Denmark a society for the promotion of scientific pursuits and a literary magazine, reads educational lectures for women, supports "little Hans Christian", his namesake - the future great writer Hans Christian Andersen. Oersted becomes a national hero. Oersted died on March 9, 1851. They buried him at night. A crowd of two hundred thousand people, lighting the way with torches, accompanied him on his last journey. Mourning melodies specially composed in his memory sounded. Scientists, government officials, members of the royal family, diplomats, students, ordinary Danes felt his death as a personal loss. For many things they were grateful to him. And not least for the fact that he gave the world new secrets. Author: Samin D.K.
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