As humans we often think we have a pretty good handle on the basics of the way the world works, from an intuition about gravity good enough to let us walk around, play baseball, and land spacecraft on the moon, or an understanding of electricity good enough to build everything from indoor lighting to supercomputers. […]
Bits of material levitating against gravity, a stream of water deflected by invisible means, sparks of light appearing out of thin air; with observations like those, it’s a wonder that the early experiments into the nature of electricity progressed beyond the catch-all explanation of magic. And yet they did, but not without a lot of […]