Maya & Jared work through electromagnetism — from bench gear to the speed of light, one experiment at a time.
Jared — a physics TA with a tuxedo and a chalkboard — and Maya — finance lead with a spreadsheet and healthy skepticism — start with the practical question of how to buy and use instruments, walk through each of Maxwell's four equations with a bench-top demo, then close the loop: the wave equation, the two constants, and Hertz's spark-gap experiment that confirmed it all in 1888. Each episode below explains its topic in the text; the video goes into the full derivation and demo.
The series opener. A $9k analyzer and a $14k analyzer measure the same frequencies — but not the same signals. Jared and Maya break down total cost of ownership: phase noise, rework, and the time you lose when the cheap instrument can't see the problem. The episode that establishes the duo's dynamic: Maya counts the dollars, Jared counts the decibels.
▶ WatchLunar ranging in one demo: fire a laser pulse at the Apollo-era corner-cube retroreflectors, time the round trip, multiply by the speed of light. The corner cubes return light exactly the way it came in — the reason a few photons out of a quadrillion make it back, and why the Earth–Moon distance is known to millimeters.
▶ WatchGauss's law for electricity. Electric flux through any closed surface counts the charge inside — Coulomb's 1/r² law in disguise. The demo: a charged sphere, an electroscope, and the proof that where you draw the surface never matters, only how much charge it traps.
▶ WatchGauss's law for magnetism. Cut a magnet in half and you don't get an isolated north and an isolated south — you get two complete magnets. Field lines never begin or end; every B-field loop closes on itself. The episode where the universe declines to produce a magnetic monopole, no matter how hard Jared tries.
▶ WatchFaraday's law. A changing magnetic flux through a loop induces a circulating electric field — no battery, no wire, just motion. The demo is the physics behind every generator and transformer on the grid: move a magnet, watch the electroscope move with it.
▶ WatchAmpère's law plus Maxwell's fix. Put a compass inside a charging capacitor's gap — where no current flows — and it still deflects. Maxwell's displacement current closes the symmetry: a changing E-field makes a B-field, just as a changing B-field makes an E-field. This is the equation that predicts light.
▶ WatchThe math episode: no lab demo, just a blackboard, two pieces of chalk, and a one-dollar budget. Take the curl of Faraday's law, the curl of Ampère-Maxwell, substitute, and the B-fields cancel — the wave equation falls out, with wave speed 1/√(μ₀ε₀). Light was hiding in the math since 1865. Two equations. Two curls. One substitution.
▶ WatchTwo pieces of apparatus define the constants: parallel wires carrying current give μ₀ = 4π × 10⁻⁷ H/m; a parallel-plate capacitor gives ε₀ = 8.854 × 10⁻¹² F/m. Multiply, square-root, invert — three hundred million meters per second, agreeing with Fizeau, Foucault, and Michelson. The speed of light from two chunks of metal and ceramic.
▶ WatchKarlsruhe, 1888. Hertz's induction coil fires a spark across two brass spheres; three meters away, a wire loop sparks in sync. Move the receiver and find the standing-wave maxima — every λ/2 ≈ 33 cm. Multiply λ by the oscillator frequency and you get c. Maxwell died believing the waves were real. Hertz's spark gap proved him right — and every radio since is this experiment, running.
▶ WatchOne 10-second "hero visual" per episode, rendered with Cycles on an RTX GPU — the field lines, the coil, the spark gap, the wave. The last card is the ep7 clip spliced into the episode itself, narration included.
A photon enters a corner-cube retroreflector, bounces off three mutually perpendicular mirrors, and exits exactly the way it came in — the geometry that lets one photon in a quadrillion find its way home from the Moon.
▶ WatchA charged sphere moves to three positions inside Faraday's ice pail while the field lines outside — and the electroscope reading — never budge. Where the charge sits doesn't matter; only how much of it there is.
▶ Watch