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Hertz, in his historical experiment, pro...

Hertz, in his historical experiment, produced stationary EM waves and measured the distance between two successive nodes.
Explain how this measurement enabled him to show that EM waves travelled with the same speed as the speed of light.

Text Solution

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Hertz made the experiment to find out the distance between consecutive nodes and he made an experiment to detect electromagnetic waves which travel with the same velocity of light `c = 3 xx 10^8` m/s. We know that the light is an electromagnetic wave, which propagate through a material medium say, glass. We also know that the total electric and magnetic fields inside a medium are described in terms of permittivity and magnetic permeability `mu` (these describe the factors by which the total fields differ from the external fields). These replace `epsi_0` and `mu_0` in the description to electric and magnetic fields in Maxwell.s equations with the result that in a material medium of permittivity `epsi` and magnetic permeability `mu`, the velocity of light becomes,
`v = (1)/(sqrt(muepsi))`
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