Natural Science - Year I
Unit 31: Gilbert and Magnetism
History Weblecture for Unit 31
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History Lecture for Unit 31:
William Gilbert
For Class
- Period: 1400 ce to 1700 ce
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- Geographic Location: England
- People to know: William Gilbert
- See science topics: Magnetism
Lecture outline:
William Gilbert
At the same time that Newton was crafting a new vision of the world as a kind of machine, with the motions of objects precisely defined by the external forces operating on them, William Gilbert provided a different view, in which a kind of internal "life" force created attraction and repulsion through magnetism. Like William Harvey and Andreas Vesalius, he was physician to royalty, in this case, to Elizabeth I of England. His position made him financially secure, and his light duties when the Queen was healthy left him time to work on various scientific investigations.
Gilbert was fascinated by the operation of compasses. The discovery that lodestone, rocks embedded with highly magnetized iron, could cause wires to move lies so far back in human history that we do not know the discoverer or even the first culture to play with the phenomena. By the fourteenth century, however, sailors were using simple compasses to sail out of sight of shore and still navigate their way when the pole star was not available to identify one's course.
It was widely known that two lodestones or two "charged" pieces of iron would repel or attract one another, depending on how the stones were positioned. Gilbert concluded that since a magnetized compass needle responded to its surroundings by reorienting itself, regardless of where on earth it was, the earth itself must be a magnet.
Read the biography of William Gilbert, archived from the University of Jerusalem's Institute of Chemistry site.
- Where was Gilbert educated?
- What did Gilbert discover about ways to increase and decrease magnetism in an object?
- How did he distinguish the forces of attraction and repulsion due to electricity from those due to magnetism?
- What is an "animistic" explanation of a force?
- What political events influenced the direction of Gilbert's investigations?
Look through David Stern's article on De Magnete.
- How does Edward Wright, in the introduction, try to show that Gilbert's work does not contradict Scripture?
- How does Gilbert justify the study of magnetism as practical?
- How did Gilbert use experiments to establish that variation (declination) of the compass needle was a result of the variation in the earth's surface?
Study/Discussion Questions:
- How does an "animistic" universe differ from the mechanistic universe of Newton? from the "great chain of being" universe of Aristotle?
- The idea of the earth as a big magnet and a stone as a small magnet is and example same concept expressed both a macrocosm and microcosm. How do we use analogies between large scale objects to understand small scale objects? What kinds of problems could arise if we depend on these analogies?
- Like the Principia Mathematica of Newton, Gilbert's work was written in Latin. How did choice of language limit the audience to which these works could be addressed?
Further Study/On Your Own
- David Stern's site on The Great Magnet, Earth discusses the culture of England at the time of the publication of the De Magnete and outlines its influence.
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