A Rock Is Trapped Light

I never really understood physics. It proves we can't ever really know what's going on. Especially for the deepest question. How come the closer we look at our world, the less stuff we find? When we zoom in, we just find vibrating energy, not stuff. That bugged me. How does movement become a rock?

This story starts over 2600 years ago with two magic rocks. One was a heavy black stone that could pull on iron. The other was a piece of petrified tree sap called amber that when rubbed against fur would attract things. This leads to the first big question at the root of physics. The mystery of action at a distance. They didn't know what these forces were. So they used the only analogy that made sense to them at the time, life. They thought these rocks had souls and wanted to move.

Soon after this was replaced with a new analogy, smell. This analogy made sense because it was the only other thing in nature that travels invisibly and has an effect on us at a distance. One theory imagined the magnetic force as scent particles that were shaped like keys and would fit into microscopic holes that matched the pores in the iron and pulled it back. But something like wood had different shaped holes so they didn't affect it. They just bounced off.

A few hundred years later, another analogy emerges. Suction. Inspired by medical cupping glasses where you heat them up, place them on the skin, and as they cool, they create a vacuum that sucks the skin up. Some thought the stones might be doing the same thing, pulling everything nearby inward. For centuries, these invisible forces were explained as some kind of wind. The Chinese called it ki, the breath of the earth, which would blow on compasses. Whatever this force was, it seemed to be everywhere, but no one knew why.

Then came the 1600s, the scientific revolution, the moment we added experiments to justify the stories we told. William Gilbert is a great example. He was the physician to Queen Elizabeth the first and hated every one of those old analogies. So, he designed a series of experiments to prove them wrong. He put magnets behind paper, behind glass, behind water, and found the force passed through everything. He showed you couldn't blow away magnetism with wind. It didn't budge. So, this force wasn't a substance because nothing was being emitted. He imagined it as a sphere of power pushing outwards, what he called an orb of virtue. This field followed the same shape at every scale.

But when Gilbert tested the other magic rock, amber, he found something strange. The attraction could be blocked. A single sheet of paper stopped it and wind can blow it around. He gave it a name, electricus, the Greek word for amber. And this electric force remained a mystery for another century until an accidental discovery in 1729. Steven Gray was exploring the force created by rubbing objects and holding them near lightweight things. And he stumbled onto something unexpected. The force could travel down a wire. Set up a small ball like styrofoam and run a wire to a charged object like a balloon you rub on fur. When you bring the charged object to one end of the wire, the force travels down the line and pulls on the ball as if it was beside it. There was no way this was a scent. So, a new analogy emerged. Electricity was an invisible weightless fluid that could travel down wires like water through a pipe. So, by now we had two invisible forces and they seemed completely different at this moment in history. One was a shape, the other was a flow.

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That changed in 1820 when a Danish professor URSD was playing with electric current near a compass. And when he connected the wire to a battery, the compass needle twitched. This meant that a moving electric charge creates a magnetic field. And this force wraps around the wire in circles forming a vortex pattern. And this discovery inspired Michael Faraday. And after 10 years of experiments, he shocked the world when he showed it worked the other way. In 1831, he shook a magnet near a wire and measured an electric current which appeared in the wire at that instant. There was no battery, no contact being made, just motion created it. This finally proved these two forces can create each other. And if the magnetic force is a field, then the electrical force must be a field, too. It wasn't a fluid. It was a field all along. And Faraday called them lines of force.

But one super interesting question remained. If you move a magnet, does a nearby magnet feel it instantly, or does that change ripple outward, taking time to cross the space between them? This leads to Maxwell who set out to answer this. And so first he needed a mechanism, something that could physically show how force moves through space. And so he created one of the most impressive thought experiments in history. First, he imagined the space all around us filled with tiny invisible vortices. Think of them like rolling pins all packed together. And to keep them from getting stuck, he added small ball bearings wedged between them to allow them to spin freely in either direction. Spin one vortex and the balls transfer that rotation to the next and the next and so on. And the disturbance travels like a wave through the medium. This mechanism he made up in his mind actually predicted how waves could travel through space.

But he took it one step further. He wanted the speed of this wave. In physics, we learned that a wave traveling through any medium, water, air, a bed sheet, a spring, its speed depends on just two things. How stiff it is and how heavy it is. If it's stiffer, the wave moves faster. If it's heavier, it moves slower. And so, Maxwell needed an answer. How stiff is this field? and how heavy is it? Now, heaviness was defined by his vortices. They were like flywheels, how hard they are to spin. Once spinning, they built up momentum and resisted being stopped. Once stopped, you needed force to get them started again. They resisted change. In the lab, this was already measured by turning power on and off in a wire. Notice how the current has to ramp up and then ramp down. It's not instant. This is because the magnetic field that a current creates acts as the heaviness. It resists change.

The next number he needed was stiffness. And in his model, this came from the ball bearings wedged between his vortices. It's the same force you feel when you're playing with charged balloons. You push them together and they push back like a spring. So, Maxwell now had two numbers for electrical heaviness and stiffness. And he just plugged those into the wave equation to get the speed of a wave, which is the square root of the stiffness divided by the heaviness, which turned out to be the speed of light, which had already been measured. This was a total surprise. It told him that light itself must be a wave in this invisible field. Electricity and magnetism were not two forces. They were one. Maxwell gave it a name, the electromagnetic field. Herz proved it in 1887 when a spark on one side of a room caused a spark across a gap on the other side of the room with no wires in between. Maxwell would have been thrilled to see this. Think of it, a spark is a rapid movement of charge which disturbs the magnetic field. And that disturbance ripples outwards through space as a wave. When it hits the metal gap on the other side of the room, it induces an electric charge creating a new spark. No wires connecting to them. The wave had to be real.

And that brings us back to the key question of this video. If light is just a vibration of this field, how does vibration become stuff? Around the same time Maxwell was building these equations, a mathematician named Hem Holtz proved something remarkable about vortices. Whether they form in air or water, they act like stable objects. Two vortices can attract or repel each other based on their spin. But the most interesting case is when a vortex closes in on itself and eats its own tail. The tube connects into a ring. What we call a tooid. Now all the energy circulates in a loop feeding back on itself. The wave has become a self-contained thing. And you can feel it try to push a vortex ring and it pushes back because the spinning motion drags the surrounding air with it. It resists being moved. It mimics mass and if they slam together they break into smaller rings but the energy is maintained.

And so Maxwell's friend Lord Kelvin saw demonstrations like this in 1867 and had a crazy idea. What if atoms aren't little balls floating in space but vortices in Maxwell's field? If light is a wave, maybe a thing is a vortex. Let's imagine what that would actually look like in the electromagnetic field. Remember, a wave of light is a ripple in this field, creating perpendicular waves of electrical and magnetic force moving together as it travels. Now, let's loop this into a tooid. So, the energy gets trapped in a loop circling around and around. This creates a magnetic field now circulating inside the tube and extending outward looping through the middle and around the outside. And perpendicular to all of this is a static electric field which is now pointing inward. That's the electric charge. And if we reverse the direction, we get opposite charge. One way negative, the other way positive.

This idea was way ahead of its time. A century later in the 90s, William Sum and Vandermark asked exactly this question. What if you could take a single photon of light and bend it into a loop? On paper, you get all the properties of an electron. Its charge, its spin, its mass, its magnetic field, all from the shape. Confined energy in this pattern resists being pushed. That resistance is mass. That's what E= MC^2 really means. Mass is just densely packed energy. So, this shape raises a question. If we zoom into matter, would we find smaller stuff or fields looping back on themselves?

In follow-up experiments, we found that the atom turned out to be 99.9999999% empty space with a tiny dense nucleus orbited by an even tinier thing, the electron. In 1922, we shot a beam of atoms between two magnets. And if the electron wasn't magnetic, the beam would go straight, but instead it split, half up, half pulled down. The electron is a tiny spinning magnet. This finally explains what a large magnet is. It's just trillions of electrons lined up spinning in the same direction that together amplify into a much bigger field you can feel. And so we kept looking deeper. Next, we broke open the tiny dense nucleus. And the mass came from even tinier things called quarks. But the quarks account for less than 1% of the mass. The other 99% is the energy of the fields in motion. The mass wasn't stuff, it was motion.

And in 1933, an incredible experiment showed that when you fire a high energy photon at an atom, the photon disappears. Two particles of opposite charge appear. We get matter from light. And the reverse works, too. You smash those particles together and they disappear and emit a wave of light. Light from matter. So imagine this energy is trapped in a loop circulating and then it escapes as a wave. Two of them can disintegrate. They can annihilate each other and nothing but light come out. So electrons are not permanent even them by themselves. An electron plus a posetron will just make light or actually the light is invisible as gamma rays but it's the same thing for a physicist.

And then we looked for the last place mass could be hiding inside those tiny quarks themselves. But when we tried to pull them apart, the force between them collapsed into a tube, a vortex of energy. Pull harder and the tube snaps, creating new particles from the energy. This is another field entirely, the strong force. Whether these forces are truly unified is still an open question. Every time we look closer to find what mass is made of, we found not stuff but energy moving in the field. And every time it took the shape of a vortex, a rock is trapped light. Whether it's the final answer or just the best analogy yet is still an open question today. But after 2600 years of looking, the shape has not changed.

I've been making YouTube videos for 15 years. All of them trying to explain things I'm curious about in a way I enjoy. And one part of my process I've never shared is I use music to find the feeling of an idea before I explain it. A year ago, I tried something new, composing my own music as a way to put more of myself into the videos and as part of my brainstorming process. So, I would sit at a piano until I find sounds that match what I'm thinking about. And then later on, I play improvisations while I'm putting the final video together, which I found both really fun and helpful. And so now I have this very cool collection of music I listen to whenever I'm working on a new idea. It's great for focused work sessions, especially on a loop. And so, I put together all my favorites from the past year into an album, my first ever music release. If you're interested, see the link below. Thanks for watching. Here's to another 15 years.