Let’s go slightly off-topic today, as it is Friday and all... Given the dominant role electronics plays in our lives these days—from the fact that you are likely reading this on some electronic device, to the plethora of other electronic devices you likely have in your home and office, to the fact that perhaps the biggest driver of the modern economy is consumer electronics—it seems only fitting that we should take a few moments to acknowledge the 120th anniversary of the electron. Well, okay, not that the electron is only 120 years old, but that the knowledge of the existence of the electron is only a century and one score years old. Hendrik Antoon Lorentz is likely not a household name, and yet this Dutch scientist revolutionized the field of physics and laid the groundwork for the developments of the 20th century and the invention of the modern world. The field (as it were) of electrodynamics dates from the famous equations by James Clerk Maxwell we all learned in high school physics that explained the relationship between electric and magnetic fields. However, if you actually read Maxwell’s writings, they’re a bit of a mess and the only reason we have the simplicity and beauty of Maxwell’s equations today is because others took the time to go through and create a kind of Cliff Notes of what Maxwell was on about. One of those was Lorentz. From Scientific American:

Lorentz’s achievement was to purify the message of Maxwell’s equations—to separate the signal from the noise. The signal: four equations that govern how electrical and magnetic fields respond to electric charge and its motion, plus one equation that specifies the force those fields exert on charge. The noise: everything else!

This led to a groundbreaking 1892 paper in which Lorentz first proposed the idea of an electron, a small particle having charge and mass that was responsible for electricity, heat, light, etc. Pretty meaty stuff, when you consider that the idea of the atom itself was still a fairly controversial thing at that time. If you remember high school chemistry, the guy who gets all the credit for discovering the electron is J.J. Thomson, and it’s true that it was Thomson’s experiments that physically found the electron, but it was Lorentz’s original paper, published 120 years ago, that proposed that such a thing could exist at all. So the next time we use an electrical or electronic device—or curse the electric company—let us tip our hat to the lowly electron that makes it all possible. For better or worse...