Hans Christian Oersted:
Teachers' Notes

Oersted is perhaps one of the lesser figures in the history of science and yet his discovery of electromagnetism fired the imagination of Faraday and others. Oersted's life and experiences have lessons for all scientists.

All his life he held a philosophical viewpoint that sometimes lead him up blind alleys and got him into controversy. During his wanderings around Europe in 1801 he adopted the ideas of Steffens, von Baader, Schelling, Schlegel, Winterl and Ritter. The latter disagreed with Lavoiser's work, which stated there were at least thirty elements. Oersted supported the idea that there were just two "principles" but was dismayed when his arguments were destroyed and he discovered that Winterl and Ritter had never experimented to test their predictions. He thus learned the value of experiment.

Oersted was also going against the trend by insisting that electricity and magnetism were linked. That he was ultimately successful lead to the search for the Grand Unified Theory, which has continued to this day and remains, despite the efforts of Einstein, Hawking and others to be elusive.

Many scientists have insisted that scientific laws and the beauty of art and nature are not in conflict (Richard Feynman for one). For Oersted, both science and beauty were manifestations of God - the laws of light and sound giving rise to the beauty of art and music.

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