Introduction Of Chapter
For over 2,000 years, people have been aware of electricity and magnetism. But the fact that they were closely connected wasn’t discovered until 1820, or almost 200 years ago. Hans Christian Oersted, a Danish physicist, observed a substantial deflection in a nearby magnetic compass needle during a lecture demonstration in the summer of 1820. He looked at this phenomenon. He discovered that the needle is tangential to an imaginary circle, with the straight wire serving as its centre and the needle’s plane being perpendicular to the wire. From here Oersted concluded that moving charges or currents produced a magnetic field in the surrounding space.
In this chapter we will discover how magnetic fields are created by currents and also cover the forces that a magnetic field applies to moving charged particles, such as protons, electrons, and wires that carry current. We will also examine how a cyclotron may accelerate particles to extremely high energies. How a galvanometer works and measures currents and voltages will be a part of our study in this chapter.