The Marriage of Space and Time

The marriage of space and time that heralded the modern era began with the marriage, in 1864, of electricity and magnetism. This remarkable intellectual achievement, based on the cumulative efforts of great physicists such as AndrŽ-Marie Amp?re, Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, and Michael Faraday, was capped by the brilliant British physicist James Clerk Maxwell. He discovered that the laws of electricity and magnetism not only displayed an intimate relationship with one another but together implied the existence of “electromagnetic waves,” which should travel throughout space at a speed that one could calculate based on the known properties of electricity and magnetism. The speed turned out to be identical to the speed of light, which had previously been measured.

Occurred when the relationship between electricity and magnetism was discovered.