Electricity and magnetism feel like separate phenomena — one lives in wires and lightning, the other in fridge magnets and compasses. One of the great triumphs of physics was discovering they're two aspects of a single force, and that a moving one creates the other. We trace that unification and follow it right down the power line into your home.

You'll come away understanding what electric current really is, why a moving magnet makes electricity and a current makes magnetism, how that single insight runs every generator and electric motor on Earth, and why light itself falls out of the same equations.

Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au

Further reading: “The Feynman Lectures on Physics,” Volume II; Royal Institution “Fa ...