Dan Fleisch’s goal of walking tens of thousands of steps a day usually takes him up and down Fountain Boulevard and Avenue and all around the Wittenberg University campus, where he teaches physics.
But this summer, Fleisch is in London (the one in England), where his 20,000 to 25,000 steps a day often take him other places, including through a park system he says has to be seen to be believed.
He’s often enough walking off the stress of his labors on the online version of the latest of a series of student physics guides he’s writing for the official press of the world’s third-oldest surviving university, Cambridge.
Even more than the other guides, this one will take advantage of computer technology by providing moving graphs to illustrate points and spots where students can essentially pull off the road to get a better explanation of important points in the text.
As it turns out, Fleisch’s flat (not a tire, but an apartment) happens to be “just around the corner” from 48 Blandford St., a shop where a young Michael Faraday worked as an apprentice printer.
Whether it’s because he’s aware some university students don’t take the step isn’t clear. But for whatever reason, Fleisch is particularly excited that while at work, Faraday “actually read some of the books he was binding.”
They were science books. And those books – along with the encouragement of Faraday’s boss, George Riebau — converted a curious bookbinder into one of the great experimental scientists of his time.
One thing that caught Faraday’s curiosity was the printed version of an 1820 report from Danish scientist Hans Oersted, who noticed what Fleisch reports here: “that an electric current passing through a conducting wire caused a nearby compass needle to deflect” or move from pointing north.
Oersted reported it because it seemed pretty weird — weird enough to get scientists wonder whether electricity and magnetism were somehow related.
Like the modern rock group AC/DC, Faraday was curious enough to wonder if the opposite of what Oersted had reported might work. He wondered whether a magnetic field could produce electricity.
In 1831, he discovered his hunch was correct. An electric current could be produced in a wire if a magnetic field moved around it.
He also found what many New Jersey hair dressers know: the more coils (the Jersey pronunciation of curls), the better.
The amount of electricity, said Fleisch, “increases in direct proportion to the number of loops on the (metal conducting) coil” being used.
That’s common knowledge today in the field of electromagnetism. But back then, really, who’d have thunk it? Who’d have been whacky or curious enough to think, “Well, if we just looped the coil around a few more times, we’ll get more power.”
A New Jersey hair stylist?
Deciding against a career in hair and nails, Faraday later became the director and professor of chemistry at the Royal Institution, which is a reasonable number of steps from Fleisch’s flat (again, not a tire but an apartment).
As a professor who, through his study guides, now teaches students around the world, Fleisch particularly likes Faraday’s message about science: That who wants to advance knowledge first must master what is currently known.
But in a personality that was burning with curiosity and focused on detail, Faraday had room for a poetic side.
“Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature,” he wrote, “and in such things as these, experiment is the best test.”
So while the method of science is purposely methodical, its underlying purpose is to discover patterns that make people scratch (usually) their heads and say, “Who’d have thunk it?”
One more note about wonder.
When his fiancé, Jill, needed to return to Springfield this summer, she and Fleisch took the tube (not the inside part of a flat tire, but a subway) to Heathrow Airport.
On his return trip, Fleisch used some of his 20,000-plus footsteps of that Sunday to take him to an Italian café “that serves what may be the best cappuccino and cannoli on the planet.”
(Ever the scientist, Fleisch is using the words “what may be the best” until he can, by experiment, prove the case with certainty.)
“For no particular reason,” he said, “I had been thinking about the future of humankind and the possibility of our species spreading to other planets.
“And there, in the middle of Hyde Park (not the one in Cincinnati, but the one in London — the London in England) he began hearing voices.
A high-pitched voice among them sang the words “Flying Mother Nature’s silver seed to a new home in the Sun.”
It not only sounded like Neil Young, whose “After the Gold Rush” was “pretty much an anthem of my adolescence,” said Fleisch. “It was Neil Young (with Crazy Horse in tow) appearing at the British Summertime music festival … in Hyde Park.
“A few tickets were still to be had,” he added, “and several hours later I was back in my flat in Marylebone, asking myself, ‘Did that really happen?’ ”
As Faraday would have reminded him: “Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature.”
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