Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
13: Math and Prison Riots (Interview with Frank Salas) image

13: Math and Prison Riots (Interview with Frank Salas)

Breaking Math Podcast
Avatar
544 Plays8 years ago

Frank Salas is an statistical exception, but far from an irreplicable result. Busted on the streets of Albuquerque for selling crack cocaine at 17, an age where many of us are busy honing the skills that we've chosen to master, and promply incarcerated in one of the myriad concrete boxes that comprise the United States penal system. There, he struggled, as most would in his position, to better himself spiritually or ethically, once even participating in a prison riot. After two stints in solitary confinement, he did the unthinkable: he imagined a better world for himself. One where it was not all him versus the world. With newfound vigor, he discovered what was there all along: a passion for mathematics and the sciences. After nine years of hard time he graduated to a halfway house. From there, we attended classes at community college, honing his skills using his second lease on life. That took him on a trajectory which developed into him working on a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Michegan. We're talking, of course, about Frank Salas; a man who is living proof that condition and destiny are not forced to correlate, and who uses this proof as inspiration for many in the halway house that he once roamed. So who is he? What is his mission? And who is part of that mission? And what does this have to do with Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism?


--- 


This episode is sponsored by 

· Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast.  https://anchor.fm/app


Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/breakingmathpodcast/support

Recommended
Transcript

Introduction: Math and Society

00:00:00
Speaker
So here at Breaking Math, of course, very often we like to talk about all things math and society, but we also have another interest. Occasionally on our show, we'll have a guest on who has a specific experience with math education or STEM education.
00:00:18
Speaker
And we like to bring on guests who may have a unique perspective on things like education in STEM, which is science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. And that's what we're doing on today's episode.

Frank Salas: From Prison to PhD

00:00:31
Speaker
Today, I am interviewing a student named Frank Salas, who is currently a PhD student in electrical engineering at the University of Michigan. And he's also a recent graduate of the University of New Mexico, also with a bachelor's in electrical engineering.
00:00:49
Speaker
Frank has quite a story about what got him interested in electrical engineering. Frank's solace is a statistical exception, but far from an irreplicable result. Busted on the streets of Albuquerque for selling crack cocaine at 17, an age where many of us are busy honing the skills that we've chosen to master, and promptly incarcerated in one of the myriad concrete boxes that comprise the United States penal system.
00:01:15
Speaker
There he struggled, as most would in his position, to better himself spiritually or ethically, once even participating in a prison riot. After two stints in solitary confinement, he did the unthinkable. He imagined a better world for himself, one where it was not all him versus the world. With newfound vigor, he discovered what was there all along, a passion for mathematics and the sciences. After nine years of hard time, he graduated to a halfway house. From there, he attended classes at community college, honing his skills using his second lease on life.
00:01:45
Speaker
That took him on a trajectory which developed into him working on a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan. We're talking of course about Frank Salas, a man who is living proof that condition and destiny are not forced to correlate, and who uses this proof as inspiration for many in the halfway house that he once roamed.

Inspiration and Transformation

00:02:03
Speaker
So who is he? What is his mission? And who is part of that mission? And what does this all have to do with Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism?
00:02:12
Speaker
All this and more on A Breaking Math. Episode 13, Math and Prison Riots.
00:02:24
Speaker
I'm Jonathan. And I'm Gabriel. And as you heard at the top of the show, our featured guest today is Frank Salas. Frank, would you like to introduce yourself? My name is Frank Salas. Frank has quite a story about what got him interested in electrical engineering. Frank, I'd like to talk to you a little bit about your stories, specifically your education and what made you choose the path that you chose.
00:02:49
Speaker
So speaking from when I was in college, I originally started out I wanted to major in linguistics and I took pre-calculus just kind of for the fun of it because I needed some more credits when I was at CNM and I took it with Judy Lallani. I'm sure you had her for some classes at CNM.
00:03:09
Speaker
Yes, in fact, I hit her for MATLAB, and she actually is a follower of the Breaking Math podcast. Hi, Ms. Milani, how are you? Well, she knew my backstory, which we'll get into, and she kind of forcefully told me, you are not doing linguistics, and you need to look at physics and math. And I did, and I found out I liked it, and I was sometimes good at it.
00:03:34
Speaker
How cool, how cool, yeah. Miss Lalani is, of course, as Frank said, a math professor and sometimes a MATLAB professor at CNM, and she's very passionate about math and very passionate at her students, so she's quite awesome. Yeah, so now actually I'd like to talk to you a little bit about your backstory, and this goes basically a little bit into your formative years, let's say, you know, as a teenager as well as an adult and as recently.
00:03:57
Speaker
Can you tell us about your attitude toward education and about your life experience, let's say, let's say around age 17? So I'm currently 34.

The Turning Point: Solitary Reflection

00:04:08
Speaker
I started college when I was 29. So the question is, why did you start college so late? And the answer to that is I spent my 20s in the federal prison system from 20 to 29. I was in the federal prison system for drug charges. And that started in 2003 till 2012.
00:04:25
Speaker
Now, I've heard that there's not much reform to be found in the prison system, so why do you think you found reform in it? Or was it your experiences from the prison system, or was it your experiences despite the prison system? So, mostly my experiences, I would say, despite the prison system. But, so, you know, growing up as a teenager, I was kind of wild, and what some people would term a knucklehead.
00:04:50
Speaker
my wife doesn't like when I use that term because she thinks people don't know what it means but um that's that's what I was as a teenager and that's why I got involved in the things I did and what sent me to prison but also going to prison it's not like you immediately like you know you have the handcuffs on and immediately you're changed I went through years while I was incarcerated where I was still wild and there was a period in 2007 I was in a facility in Big Spring, Texas
00:05:17
Speaker
And there was a huge prison riot and I got grouped in with a bunch of guys and they sent us to a lockdown unit in Oakdale, Louisiana. And at that point, we stayed there for about 11 and a half months, close to a year on lockdown. And, you know, needless to say, I had a lot of time to think. And that's when I first started to kind of contemplate my life and sort of think about other things to do. Now, for those in acquainted, can you describe what lockdown is?
00:05:44
Speaker
Lockdown is 23 hours a day for five days a week. The other two days, you're 24 hours a day, just in your cell. So when I say 23 hours a day, you get one hour of recreation. And that's like in a cage the size of a bedroom, maybe, that you get out for rec during the weekdays. And then you get a shower three times a week. And the showers are usually located down on the other side of the unit.
00:06:10
Speaker
and you're handcuffed to the shower. The shower's in a cage, take a shower, go back to the cell. So you're basically just in the cell all day, every day. And was it this time that you found time to read or just to think?
00:06:25
Speaker
I had time to think but on a deeper level I had time to look within instead of without and what I mean by that is I was able to truthfully and honestly ask myself why I went to prison and not the surface superficial reasons of of course I was you know selling drugs but on a deeper level why did I do the things that I did on a psychological level and to kind of psychoanalyze myself
00:06:55
Speaker
And that was what allowed me to truly change my outlook and what I wanted to do in life.

Education Journey: From Linguistics to Math

00:07:01
Speaker
And then once I left there, I was sent to Kentucky. I had the opportunity to be a settlement with a guy who he had been locked up like 20 years and he was into studying languages.
00:07:12
Speaker
And so kind of under his wing, I started looking at languages and I started to study Spanish and French. And that's what got my idea of, you know, OK, I'm going to get out and go to college and I'll study linguistics because languages are fun. But fortunately, I found a different language to study math.
00:07:29
Speaker
Check out episode six word, but also check out episode five language of the universe but So would you say that this individual your cellmate had a big impact on you or were you already headed that way? I was already headed to
00:07:49
Speaker
you know, not getting out and committing crime. And I know that might sound easy for some people that aren't in that situation, but it takes a lot to truly be honest with yourself on what you're going to do, whether you're in prison or whatever you're doing in life.
00:08:04
Speaker
But having the interactions with him is what implanted the seed that maybe I'll try college when I get out. Because when I got arrested, I didn't have any technical skills, no trade skills, no work experience. So there was a sort of nervousness of getting out. What was I going to do? I didn't have any skills. I didn't have any financial cushions. So when you got out, what was your game plan? Did you have one at that point? Were you formulating it the entire time that you were in?
00:08:33
Speaker
I was formulating it like my last couple years. I wanted to go to college. And I know that sounds vague, but that was my game plan. Do what I have to do to go to college. And so when I was released to the halfway house where I stayed there for six months.
00:08:48
Speaker
In my first pass to leave the halfway else, I went down to CNM and went through their process to figure out how to get enrolled. And luckily I was qualified for the Pell Grant, so I was able to start. I got out in February, I was able to start classes that summer. Now, for those unacquainted,
00:09:05
Speaker
And myself included, can you tell us a little bit about the rules, regulations, stipulations of a halfway house and did that make it more or less difficult for you to start college? The halfway house makes it difficult for people who don't want to behave and they want to experience catching up on old times type of mentality. Me, I was on a mission when I got out.
00:09:32
Speaker
First, I wanted to go to school, but like I said, I didn't have a financial cushion, so I needed to set myself up financially. I wasn't trying to look for the greatest job or the highest pain. I just wanted a job. I was able to get a job at Long John Silvers, fortunately, because I didn't have anything when I got out. I had literally the clothes on my back.
00:09:49
Speaker
So for somebody like me who was motivated to do something like that, halfway else was super beneficial. I had a bed to sleep in and I had three meals a day, you know, and then I can go out and look for a job and things like that. So would you credit the educational system, mathematics or physics or what would you credit with your current life success or would you just credit your own spirit?
00:10:13
Speaker
Um, I mean, I wouldn't be selfish and just say it was only my own spirit. I would say the sort of wonder of math and physics is what inspires me to move forward. There's, you know, no matter what you study in these fields, there's like always so much more and it's like the deeper you get there's just even more, you know, it's like pulling that string on the end of a sweater. You know, the more you pull it, you're just unraveling more strings and you can, you know, never get to the end.
00:10:44
Speaker
One of the things that I want to ask you about actually is during your time, whether it was incarcerated or the time in the halfway home or even afterward, were there any books that especially had an impact on you both for your appreciation of mathematics and or your appreciation for physics?
00:11:03
Speaker
So I read a book called The Self-Aware Universe. This was while I was incarcerated and it was written by a theoretical physicist named Amit Goswami out of the University of Oregon. And what he does is the first half of the book he kind of breaks down quantum mechanics for the layman.
00:11:20
Speaker
then the second half is he equates those ideas to his spiritual views he's a Hindu and so he kind of tries to bridge his spiritual views with the quantum physics now I'm not really a spiritual person in that sense but just even I had never been exposed to quantum mechanics in general much physics in general and just like the
00:11:43
Speaker
thinking about things, these far out ideas that I had never heard of really piqued my interest of just, you know, education in general and just kind of learning things that like, I had no idea that there was stuff like that even out there. And it just kind of opened up a lot of, you know, mental doors of what to look for.
00:12:00
Speaker
One of the things I just want to ask you is, having it made it as far as you have on your journey, I'm quite curious what you might say to others who are in a similar situation to yourself, but who aren't as far. Say those who are either incarcerated and looking to being on their way out, or those who are in a halfway home, and I realize this is not a math-related question, what would you say to them?
00:12:24
Speaker
So I would say the number one thing that allowed me and I know you know this is specific to me so it might not apply to everybody but I can only speak of

Personal Growth and Letting Go

00:12:33
Speaker
my own experience. The number one thing that allowed me to completely change my outlook and what I was going to do in life was to
00:12:40
Speaker
truly let go and what i mean by that is to let go of like you know let's say i was incarcerated for um selling drugs so let go of the guy who um ratted me out for instance like you know who cares about that you know a lot of people have a hard time doing that or you know i missed out on my 20s where a lot of people are say going and going to the club and partying at bars well you know i needed to get out and
00:13:05
Speaker
set myself up financially so I didn't have time to go out and catch up on you know the quote-unquote old times with people and another to let go of old friends and I know that might sound kind of cold-hearted but you know a lot of times those old friends are still doing the same thing and so to just completely let go of those things and to just focus on yourself and be selfish with yourself and your goals can allow somebody to move forward.
00:13:34
Speaker
I've heard that in prison they have really kind of crappy, baloney sandwiches, is that true? It depends where you're at. I was in the federal system, so some places had good food, some places had bad food. It really depends on where you're at.
00:13:51
Speaker
What discipline within electrical engineering are you studying? So applied electromagnetics and that's also pretty broad. Why don't you break it down for someone who's like never heard of it before? So what I specifically am focusing on is wireless power transfer. So picture like the little, you can go buy these little docking stations for your cell phone to charge without plugging in.
00:14:15
Speaker
That same type of concept and the applied electromagnetics For somebody that doesn't understand would maybe be like how satellites talk to us down here on the ground interesting interesting So wireless power transfer I've heard of this is it correct that Tesla designed the precursor to wireless power transfer and just to clarify Wireless power transfer is not to be confused with free energy or anything like that. There's no such thing as free energy. So
00:14:41
Speaker
No, not at all.

Wireless Power and Tesla

00:14:43
Speaker
There is no free lunch, as many teachers like to say, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I was just thinking of the basic idea of like charging something from a distance, which is a really cool idea, right? Yeah. So, I mean, there's people now that they create these supposed free energy things, but what they're doing is wireless power harvesting. And so, you know, you have tons of signals going radio stations and whatnot, and there's
00:15:07
Speaker
Energy associated with those signals and they just basically harvest that energy and then say look I have free energy nice nice background energy harvesting So for those who love to speculate about the future and what technologies are coming down the pike? What are some technologies that we may see in five years ten years one hundred years if this technology is fully realized? I
00:15:30
Speaker
With autonomous vehicles, charging cars, you can have, say in the asphalt somewhere, a wireless charging, I'll use the word pad for lack of a better word. And then of course you would have something in your car and where you just park above that. And then also, you know, for like say small electronic devices in your house, you'd have some central unit that charges your devices.
00:15:54
Speaker
So I also studied applied electromagnetics when I got my master's degree in electrical engineering. Yeah, we took antennas together with Tareef. Oh, Professor Tareef. He was phenomenal. Yeah, I like Tareef. He wrote a lot of letters for me to get into grad school. That's awesome. That's awesome.
00:16:13
Speaker
Now, Frank, you wanted to talk a little bit about Maxwell's equations. Can you break those down for

Foundations of Electromagnetism

00:16:18
Speaker
us a little bit? So there's four Maxwell's equations. OK, so let me backtrack a little. So Maxwell in his treatise where he developed his ideas, there was actually, I think, like 18 or 20. And then you had another mathematician, Heaviside. I don't know his first name, but he's the one that broke him down more concise to the four equations that we know of.
00:16:40
Speaker
And for our listeners, a lot of the common calculus notations that you see all the time in a calculus course was really because of Maxwell. They weren't really necessary until he came out with this engineering stuff, especially with things like divergence, which is not very popular until Maxwell came around.
00:16:58
Speaker
needed it for his equations. Is that correct Frank? I don't know if that's correct but he definitely was in favor of the what's called the differential form and that would be like the divergence curl notation. And we will break those down in just a moment. They went from 18 to 3 equations you said? Four. So there's four. You actually only need two of them that are there's two that are completely independent you know the other two can be derived
00:17:24
Speaker
from the first two and then there's what's called the continuity equation which also goes with them so you know Maxwell's equations are thought of as four but actually there's five and that includes the continuity equation so let's break it down what's the first one that you'd like to talk about so the first one that's typically listed is Gauss's law of electricity which basically says that the
00:17:46
Speaker
divergence out of a specific geometry equals to the charge? For listeners who are less familiar, perhaps those of high school age, how do you explain what divergence is? You can use any analogy at all.
00:18:07
Speaker
like say water going through a pipe and if we take like a cross section of the pipe like what water is flowing through that cross section at like a point in time or something like that. Yeah it read Maxwell's treatise and he calls it an unimaginable fluid or something like that because it's like a fluid but has different properties than water because water is not compressible things like that.
00:18:30
Speaker
No, yeah, I'm just saying just to think about like, you know, something moving through a specific, like the cross section, like I said. Yeah, you're right. It's not the same as water. Jonathan, didn't you read the Feynman undergraduate lecture series in physics, the one specifically about electromagnetism? Yeah, yeah, I did. I did a little bit ago. Feynman does like an amazing job talking about all this stuff. If you want to learn electricity, there's almost nobody better than Feynman.
00:18:58
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I gotta say I love the way Feynman explains it and I really love his analogies. In fact, my goal for this podcast in general and for this segment is to make it really easy to understand so that anybody, my nephew, my grandmother, anyone regardless of their background can understand this segment.
00:19:16
Speaker
So, let's break it down even further then. What's electricity? That's a good question. You can't directly measure an electric field. That's something that's indirectly measured through charge or current. So, let's break it down even further. I'm sure that anybody here who's listening to this podcast has encountered charge.
00:19:39
Speaker
You do things like charge your phone. But what is charge? So if we break it down further to the electron... Can you break down charge even further? Are there individual like atoms of charge so to speak? Yeah, so within an atom of course you have proton neutron electrons and so with electricity we're thinking of the electron. I mean you get into other concepts like with semiconductors and you know you talk about
00:20:03
Speaker
positive charges which are holes but like for simplicity think of the electron when talking about electricity or currents. Now what we are referring to here is actually the movement of individual electrons which is what electricity is.
00:20:16
Speaker
Oh yeah, and that's what I was getting to do. It's the fact that there's almost a universal sense in which electricity cannot be broken down further. So there's actually a new fun segment that I really like that we're going to do in Breaking Math, and it's kind of one of these hypothetical questions that we like to talk to people. Essentially, the purpose of this kind of question is to say if you had unlimited funding,
00:20:41
Speaker
and in all the curiosity and wonder that you have right now, what would you like to research? What would you like to invent? What would you like to see built? I don't know about an invention, but as far as research, I would like to look into the electrical signals produced by the human body, and not just restricted to the human body, but just biological organisms in general, what type of
00:21:07
Speaker
signals are being produced, what frequencies are being produced, and how can those be utilized. I mentioned wireless power harvesting before because people make devices that harvest electromagnetic power that's already out there. Just looking at the signals that are produced by biological organisms. Do you think, in your opinion, and I don't know too much
00:21:30
Speaker
I mean, during the recording we have breaks and during the break you're talking about reflection and S points, S signals. S parameters. S parameters. Do you think that would have anything to do with modeling the nervous system better? Perhaps it depends on, so I mean the S parameters are a fundamental concept with dealing with high frequency circuits.
00:21:54
Speaker
Which does not describe the human brain. I mean, well, maybe it does. The human brain, the signals travel about 300 feet per second. So could the fact that they switch on and off a lot faster than that, could that be modeled as a high frequency circuit? Like, I don't know. You know, I'd be reluctant to say one way or the other. No, you have to say.
00:22:17
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know because like when I think of like, you know, AC circuits and it's the AC frequencies, I just think of like the, you know, the spitting that could be quick back and forth. So, so, you know, I don't know. I mean, our, I don't say again, I'm going to have to ask a biologist this or somebody who's familiar with the nervous system about the back and forth, you know, of the signals in the nervous system. I'm not sure.
00:22:36
Speaker
Well, you know, there's there's an idea that's kind of theorized that cells communicate using RF. Now, you know, they they it is known that cells communicate using electrical signals. I'm not a biologist. I don't I mean, you know, can also channel all that.
00:22:51
Speaker
yeah well you know so if you think of like biofilms that are formed on rocks in a river you know as the river's flowing you know they're obviously you're not going to be able to have a chemical channel for these cells to communicate so it's kind of theorized that they're using RF when they form these chains to make this biofilm and that's sort of a area of research that some people would like to do i don't know if there's a whole bunch in there or it hasn't been proven that they do
00:23:19
Speaker
During the pre-interview interview, yes, we did do a pre-interview interview, one of the things you had said, Frank, is that what really fascinates you is the electromagnetic spectrum as a whole. I think I don't know anybody who is aware of the electromagnetic spectrum who's not fascinated by it.
00:23:38
Speaker
You know something that is just the idea of frequency like even you know the electricity coming out the wall 60 Hertz So that that means that it flips from positive to negative 60 times in one second You know as fast as you snap your finger 60 times now your computer is you know, let's say 4 gigahertz That's a billion times 4 billion times in one second. I don't know for some reason to me that's just Fascinating that we can even measure it also as fascinating
00:24:06
Speaker
One thing that fascinates me bringing that up is just the fact that there's such a qualitative difference between the different frequencies. Like you have gamma rays, which are completely different in character to light waves, but they still have so many similarities. And then you have like theoretical electromagnetic waves and nobody has any idea of how to produce because they're so low frequency.
00:24:28
Speaker
I almost think that we could have a whole episode on just the electromagnetic spectrum. I don't know, just a thought. Well, we are going to have an episode. Stay tuned, everybody, and several episodes about frequencies.
00:24:39
Speaker
You know, and Frank, I want to bring us something else as well. You know, as we're talking about the electromagnetic spectrum, but we're also talking about other things like biological processes. So obviously we know our eyes. What's the frequency of the visible light spectrum? It's about 10 to the 14 in magnitude, 10 to the positive 14.
00:24:59
Speaker
so what that would you know the the wavelength is between you know mid 400 nanometers to about 700 nanometers right right right right yeah yeah yeah in that range yeah that's just a given frequency yeah and that's we get all of our visual information rather the you know the visible light spectrum as we see we see all those we don't see anything in the ultraviolet we don't see anything so that's an interesting
00:25:21
Speaker
An interesting topic is that's also the life-giving quality of water because water has at the visible spectrum it resonates. That reminds what you're saying kind of reminds me of a treatise by gutta on it's called on color or something like that. I would encourage all our listeners to check that out. It's one of the last quality totally qualitative scientific texts.
00:25:51
Speaker
I've read a couple of books. So, you know, I mentioned the visible light spectrum, but there's a book that I read that's a fascinating one and it's based on Physics research and biology research and I don't know that I would it is a true story It's slightly embellished as a lot of stories are the book is called the emperor of scent and in this book it is about a physicist who met with a lot of chemists and You can already tell how I'm setting this up here
00:26:17
Speaker
These chemists work in the perfume industry and they've got models for how the sense of smell work. And according to their models, the sense of smell, what we experience is smell and differences in different smells of fancy perfumes are based on the shape of the molecule.
00:26:33
Speaker
The physicist has a lot of experience in the electromagnetic spectrum, specifically in RF frequencies, and he postulates that it is actually the vibrations of the molecule and the RF, the radio frequency waves that are made from the movement of electrons in the molecules that in fact produce the smell.
00:26:51
Speaker
And it's never completely proven, it's almost proven, but it is not proven conclusively. But it's just fascinating because in an upcoming episode we're going to do, you know, no spoilers here, but you know, we're going to talk a lot about human consciousness and we're going to talk about how we get information from all of our senses. And to really realize how many of our senses and how our information in the universe comes from vibrations and the electromagnetic spectrum is just fascinating.
00:27:17
Speaker
And if that seems a little bit far-fetched, especially because we don't have language for stuff like smell, consider the fact that philosophers, until the thermometer was invented, considered temperature to be something too complicated to be described by a single number. They thought there's an difference between bitter cold and, like, icy cold. All these different things. Um, yeah. So Maxwell's first law, could you explain that in the simplest terms you can?

Simplifying Maxwell's Equations

00:27:44
Speaker
So explaining it in the simplest terms is something that I myself struggle with, so I'll try. Maxwell's equations are written in two forms, the differential and the integral form. So the differential form says that the divergence of the electric flux equals the charge going through a surface.
00:28:06
Speaker
So the way I like to think about that is like if we had a pipe with some water flowing through it and we just cut that pipe at a specific cross section and the flow through that cross section would be the divergence. And I know water is not comparable to electricity, but just like an analogy. Yeah. Let's break that down a little bit further. Take me on a mental journey.
00:28:34
Speaker
on the kind of fluid that, because I know that electricity used to be called the electric fluid back in the early days. And why is that?
00:28:44
Speaker
so i don't know why is that maybe that comes from the time when they thought there was an ether or something but the electric field is created from charges when you know a positive or a negative charge and these can be associated with and um atoms that are have one polarity a positive or negative
00:29:07
Speaker
Now let's go into the positive and negative thing a little bit. I'm not an electrical engineer, but I know that there's something that has to do with them being the wrong way around, kind of, right?
00:29:18
Speaker
So what do you mean by wrong way around? Like it doesn't flow the right way that people assume. I think what you're referring to is conventional current. Is that right? Yeah. So the electron itself doesn't move in the direction that the current moves, if that's what you're thinking. I think that is. And could we break that down? Because what I want to break it down to is a point where, I mean, electricity looks like magic.
00:29:47
Speaker
it does look like magic and that's kind of what attracts me to it in a sense so like if you have current and we could we'll think of i'll loosely say current as electricity the current flowing through a wire isn't like an electron flowing from one end to the other you could think of it as a line of people and one person bumps into the next person and it just follows along the line like dominoes an actual electron flows really slowly like you can actually calculate that and how slowly are we talking
00:30:16
Speaker
So, okay, so the speed of light is three times ten to the eight meters per second. Yeah. I would say maybe five orders of magnitude less. So let's say that the speed of light is like a car on the freeway. This would be like a snail or something.
00:30:32
Speaker
Yes. Okay, yeah, so basically to recap for our listeners, you know, since the time of Maxwell and of course his contemporary Faraday, who is actually buried right next to Isaac Newton, they were essentially the founders of this field of physics.
00:30:50
Speaker
Essentially, we were discussing how with electrical engineers, they knew about current and they had conventional current, which actually is the opposite of the directions that electrons flow, but also, as Frank said, a current is not a fast process. It's a very, very slow process. That's just utterly fascinating.
00:31:09
Speaker
So the energy of a current, it's, I don't know. Well, the current itself is fast, but the movement of the electron, or what's called the charge carrier. Right, right, right, right. That itself isn't, you know, relatively speaking, isn't fast. Yeah. And, you know, a big part of that is you have a current in something like copper, but that's obviously a metal where we've got electrons that are more like bees on a hive, unlike a nonmetal, where, you know, for our listeners, how would you describe the electrons on a nonmetal?
00:31:37
Speaker
Like apples on a tree. I'm sorry that that just came to me and I totally interrupted you but like they're more like apples on a tree, right? Like they're kind of stuck in place Yes. Yeah, that's that would be a good analogy. There's they're stuck in place. There's not a polarity if you if you will a Positive or negative charge as a whole so the charge has to do with how many electrons there are or what what what are we measuring we're measuring charge and
00:32:03
Speaker
so like if we have an atom and it's um you have shells to an atom that hold your electrons and if you have a shell that has you know less than the amount of electron that is required to make a complete shell then it's positively charged if you have an extra electron then it's negatively charged
00:32:23
Speaker
Yeah, so one other way to think about it, you know, when I taught AM eighth graders, we learned a lot about chemistry and you can think about it like vacancies on a bus, you know, like if you've got some vacant seats, you can think of that as a net positive charge, assuming that all the passengers are negative, because I guess people who
00:32:39
Speaker
right, are negative people. I mean, charge-wise, not attitude-wise. So if you have a bus and every seat is filled up, that's the equivalent of a neutral atom. And then a net negative atom is if you've got too many people, then everybody's negative, right? And you've got a net negativity because you've got more, if an empty seat is a positive charge, you've got more negative charges than you do positive charges. I think that works, right?
00:33:09
Speaker
Yeah, that works. And I think that one thing that I want to get back to is Maxwell's laws, and then after we talk about Maxwell's laws, we're going to talk a little bit about the history of electricity. But Maxwell's first law, you're saying that the amount of the electric field, an electric field means something different than charge, correct?
00:33:31
Speaker
So I'll backtrack a little bit. So the Maxwell's equations, he did not derive those. So the first one that we talked about is Gauss's law of electricity. What Maxwell did was group all of these equations together and he found a relationship between
00:33:49
Speaker
not between electricity and magnetism and was able to group these equations together and he his important contribution is why these equations get named after him is what's called displacement current and that was what was attached to ampere's law because ampere was the one that derived that law which says that if we have a magnetic field around a wire then we'll have a current associated with that magnetic field through the wire
00:34:17
Speaker
And an experiment they could do is with a compass, correct? Yes. Yeah, you just take a wire and you put a compass next to it, and if there's stuff flowing through the wire, then the compass wet'll happen to it.
00:34:29
Speaker
it'll deflect. And what that means is it'll be pushed by the magnetic field in one direction or the other. What I also really love is that during Faraday's time, when he was talking about these fields, he was actually met with a lot of resistance. No pun intended.
00:34:47
Speaker
because people didn't like the idea of this invisible field that had an effect. But through his experiments, along with the experiments of other people like Volta in Italy, he showed that this electric field certainly exists. And it's one of the basic properties of the universe, right, the electromagnetic force?
00:35:06
Speaker
Yes. It's basically in the DNA of the universe kind of like as we as we know it currently that there are there's just something called the electromagnetic force I mean or electromagnetic electromagnetism.
00:35:21
Speaker
Frank, just out of curiosity, do you know much about the unification theories of any of the forces? I don't. I don't. It's something that I've wanted to look more into. But I mean, electromagnetic force is the most well understood of the forces and physics. Yes. Yes. Even though there's gravity and even though Newton discovered gravity, we know less about gravity than we know about electromagnetism. And again, just for our curious listeners, this is a really cool part of physics, you know.
00:35:47
Speaker
So we recognize gravity, we recognize the electromagnetic force, we also recognize two other ones. We later learn about the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force. What I'm talking about, the unification, 1960s to the 1970s, there were two physicists who proved that in the early universe
00:36:08
Speaker
the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force were one and the same thing. And that happened at a very very high temperature and very very high pressure. And then only after the universe cooled down and spread out did the electromagnetic force decouple from the weak force. I just find that fascinating. Now since then people have searched but there hasn't been any
00:36:30
Speaker
discoveries or any proofs that talk about a grand unified theory that really brings all four of those forces together. I just think it's really cool that that bit was discovered. Oh yeah and just to clarify some people are going to be thinking well we know a lot about gravity and that there really is the case if you're talking about on a big scale. Have you studied much in the way of general relativity?
00:36:54
Speaker
No, I took a physics at UNM called physics three and we did some relativity stuff, but I wouldn't say it was enough to say that I know relativity.
00:37:05
Speaker
One thing about general relativity is that you have these forces. It has to do with the flow of momentum in four dimensions, where one of the dimensions is time. I mean, we have these amazing formulas that have extremely good predictive power, but as we understand it, forces are supposed to have particles that exchange them, and we have not found a particle for gravity.
00:37:27
Speaker
Yes, this is true. This part always confused me because I have not taken all the physics that I need to take in order to fully understand this. You know, I know that when you get into Einstein and relativity, gravity is often thought of as just a bending of space and time. You know, and I know that that goes along with general relativity. But then, you know, that says nothing. You don't even learn about a particle exchange with gravity with that.
00:37:53
Speaker
Well, one thing that people a lot of times neglect to realize or just don't realize is that there's also a bending of space and time that happens with electromagnetic forces. A beam of light creates its own gravity in a sense. So if you could really look at it in a grand sense as almost being the same thing as electromagnetism in a weird way.
00:38:17
Speaker
Oh, okay. So really, like, you know, Einstein's theories, although we apply them to a gravity with a gravitational constant, they can really describe any forces.
00:38:27
Speaker
Yeah, in a way, you have the Einstein tensor on the left-hand side, this is gonna get a little bit technical, and you set it equal to the stress-energy tensor. Now, electromagnetism has a specific stress-energy tensor that deforms the universe in a specific way. What is another one of Maxwell's laws?

Understanding Gauss's Law for Magnetism

00:38:51
Speaker
so we talked about Gauss's law for electricity the electric field and we have Gauss's law for magnetism which says that the a magnetic field the flux of a magnetic field through a surface equals zero and what that means physically is that you have a north and south pole that a magnetic field will also will always come back in on itself you don't have what's called a
00:39:15
Speaker
monopole or with electric field you have like these opposite charges. One way that I like to imagine electricity and tell me if this is accurate at all because this kind of meets the road moment is imagine you have bees the size of grains of sand and they're flying all around and that's your field, right? And you have a certain amount of charge which is like the hive and you have like a wiffle ball where the bees are flying in and out of the wiffle ball.
00:39:45
Speaker
Now, if it's magnetic, if it's magnetism, then the same amount of bees are always flying in and out of the wiffle ball at the same time. Yes, I would agree with that analogy. Well, yeah, yeah, this is a fundamental constant. So just to break it down, you know, you've got electromagnetism. You've got electrons and you've got magnets. And of course, again, as you said, anytime you have a North Pole magnet, you always have a South Pole. And then this is just saying exactly what you just said, but in other words,
00:40:13
Speaker
What was fascinating is I saw a couple of physics professors once upon a time make a bet that there never will be a magnetic monopole. You can go find a single positive electron, but you can never find just the north pole lying around. You'll always have a north and south. Now, I got to witness a student bet the professor otherwise.
00:40:33
Speaker
And the student presented the professor with a paper that talked about a group of students that created a magnetic monopole using a Einstein, a Bose-Einstein condensate. Essentially, if you get a whole bunch of magnetic groupings of atoms, I'm sorry, I'm blinking here, and you arrange them around a very, very, very cold Bose-Einstein condensate, then technically speaking, you won't have the south pole of the magnet.
00:41:00
Speaker
I thought that was pretty clever. That's completely artificial. And again, depending on whether you wanted to find that as true or not, it was a clever challenge to the professor. What would you say, Jonathan? It sounds a little bit like trying to make a black body by getting a bunch of velvet boxes and putting them within one another. It's not really going to be a black body. It sounds along the same lines to me, but I don't know enough about this.
00:41:22
Speaker
Well, in electron dynamics, you use the concept of a magnetic charge for a lot of calculations, like with aperture antennas and things like that, or magnetic current, things of that nature, which don't technically exist, but you use them for your calculations.
00:41:42
Speaker
Now before we get too far into this, a lot of people, I mean everybody's familiar with lodestone and its properties, but a lot of people don't understand that it wasn't understood for a long time that magnetism and electricity were related. Can you explain the similarities and differences between the two?
00:42:02
Speaker
So Gabriel had alluded to it earlier when he mentioned Faraday who was arguably the greatest experimentalist to ever live and he's the one, I believe, I mean don't quote me on it, that first noticed the dependence of
00:42:21
Speaker
on each other of electricity and magnetism. And what he, which is Faraday's law, says that the curl of the electric field equals the time-changing magnetic field.
00:42:34
Speaker
And a curl is basically, you can imagine this, like if you ever have swirled around water where there's eddies in the water, if you imagine that going around an axis, the line that describes where the eddies are is the curl, correct? Yeah, like a whirlpool. So basically a curl curls. Pretty much. Yeah.
00:43:08
Speaker
So yeah, and then of course with Faraday, again, as we said earlier, you have a traveling electric current through a wire, and from that you have a stationary magnetic field. So that's, I think you're getting to Ampere's law, where if you excite a current through a wire, that current will create a magnetic field around the wire.
00:43:30
Speaker
Thank you. I was holding onto that for a long time. I'm glad I got to say it.
00:43:32
Speaker
Now Frank, for some of our listeners out there who might be interested, what is it like getting a degree in electrical engineering? What kind of classes do you take? That kind of thing. So to begin it's hard. You take a lot of math and
00:43:49
Speaker
You take physics classes through the physics department, but I would say that all of the engineering classes that you take, whether it's electrical, mechanical, are all physics classes. I mean, because that's what drives what you're doing is the physics.
00:44:03
Speaker
So describe a couple of classes, describe like some of your favorite classes and some of your least favorites. So I'm in grad school for applied electromagnetics, so obviously the undergrad version of electromagnetics is what piqued my interest ultimately to go further in that.
00:44:20
Speaker
but also partial differential equations in the math department. That was like the first time I really felt like I was doing some really hard math. And of course, it was an undergrad version, so it was probably watered down also.
00:44:33
Speaker
And partial differential equations, for those who are interested, is like, I'll analogy we used on another episode, was just driving, where your steering wheel is tied to the odometer, or something like that. It's basically a really dynamical, complex kind of system.
00:44:50
Speaker
Yeah, so when I took that class, we spent half the semester looking at the heat equation and the other half the wave equation. And so these are some canonical equations in math and physics. And again, one more time, I did want to go ahead and revisit explaining partial as well as ordinary differential equations. And I like your analogy, Jonathan, but I think just to elaborate, basically, it's a changing system. So whether you have a deceleration or an acceleration of a car or a change in voltage or what else?
00:45:21
Speaker
Well, I think you could actually model any system using something like, if you imagine each variable is a person and you imagine these, or a type of person, like, okay, like maybe one person's name, like Albert and the other one's named Beth, and these are your two variables. And anytime they bump into each other, they have to trade some stuff that they have in their pockets. And there's like a constant trade rate.
00:45:46
Speaker
Like, is that too complicated? I think that's too complicated, but that shows you the complexity of these systems. I mean, I would even just use the wave equation itself. You know, the wave equation from a strictly math perspective, you have two time derivatives and two spatial derivatives. But to think about that simply is, you know, how am I changing in space at the same time that I'm changing in time?
00:46:13
Speaker
And the heat equation kind of shows how heat gets distributed. So if you start, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but if you start like, let's say I put an iron on a piece of metal, you're going to have a really hot, let's say like a super hot iron and I did it really quickly, you'd have like a little hot piece of metal the shape of the size of an iron. But then the metal starts distributing the heat around it and it starts going everywhere and that's the heat equation, right?
00:46:39
Speaker
Yes. And the wave equation is let's say you have a little shallow pool and you slap it and then you have all these little waves going everywhere. Exactly.
00:46:49
Speaker
And that's how you learn and you learn to describe that mathematically in these courses. Yes. Now, what's hard about it? The fact that you have multiple variables changing. So in ordinary differential equations, you have one variable that's changing. I mean, they're still hard. But in partial differential equations, you have, like I said, you have spaces changing while time is changing. And so you just have like really complicated dynamical systems that many times are not solvable.
00:47:19
Speaker
And you don't just mean not solvable, like, um, it's too hard for most people. You literally mean you cannot be solved using what's called a closed form system, right? Yeah, exactly. So closed form, that's like, you know, in my research, you know, we're looking for closed form expressions for things, but you know, in real life and you know, the vast array of types of math functions, most of the time you cannot get a closed form solution.
00:47:47
Speaker
The way that I like to think about it sometimes is if you have a bunch of ingredients, you can sometimes combine a couple and find that combination at the store. So you get some tomatoes, you get some onions, you can find some tomato sauce at the store, but most of the time you're going to be throwing things together you cannot find at the store. I was honestly hoping you'd give some more examples of that.
00:48:10
Speaker
Sure, you get some chocolates, you get some chili, you find some mola, but you take some chocolate, you get some pears, you can't find that at the store. That actually sounds really good. I know it does, doesn't it?
00:48:23
Speaker
So that was one of our most interesting interviews that we've conducted, I think. I think so. I think so, yeah. I was very, very thankful that Frank agreed to share his story with us. I found it really inspirational. Now, for all you fans out there, there's going to be some new changes coming down the pike. We can't talk about them specifically, right? That is absolutely correct. There are definitely some changes and we are waiting before we feel that we can talk about them publicly.
00:48:51
Speaker
Yes, but just stay tuned for the same great content that you've always loved. And you will always be able to find us wherever great podcasts can be found. We won't make it hard for you.