Talk:Georg Ohm

French or German?
I notice that this has been changed a few times, but I can't understand why, and it seems to me that Ohm should clearly be considered German. He spoke German, went to German universities, and I'm not aware that the location was ever part of France.

Shouldn't this be corrected back, or am I missing something?

Xgretsch (talk) 20:12, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Ohm's birth year: 1787 or 1789???
I find different sources in which contain different information about his real born year. One of my books about him states that he was born on 1787, also I find some sources go along with this figure:, , , etc.

while 1789 seems to be mentioned more frequently:, , ,, Germany Wiki, etc.

So which one is true? Causesobad → (Talk) 14:04, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Well according to and seeing it more frequently like you said, id argue he was born in 1789, PersonM1 (talk) 17:42, 16 February 2018 (UTC) PersonM1

Someone who knows about Ohm's life should check this article.
I just fixed this, but this article used to say that Ohm's Law is the relationship between resistance and resistivity, which is terribly inaccurate. Unfortunately, that's pretty much all I know about Ohm. Also, the one cited source for this article seems to contain a very accurate definition of Ohm's Law, so it seems that this article doesn't actually stick to what the cited source says.

Also, maybe someone who is fluent in German can skim through Die galvanische Kette  and give a better description of how Ohm described the law. In the one I put in, I just verbalized V=IR (without saying resistance anywhere, since as far as I know, that term wasn't coined until later).

Misho88 (talk) 06:30, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Dubious paragraph removed
This was there since 2007, but I don't think it makes sense: "Using the results of his experiments, Ohm defined the fundamental relationship among voltage, current, and resistance. This represents the true beginning of electrical circuit analysis." This interpretation of "true beginning" would need some kind of source or attribution. I suspect it took a while yet for these concepts to jell; they didn't really even have standardized definitions for these quantities yet. Here is an article that might help clarify. Dicklyon (talk) 04:10, 7 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Belevitch opens his thorough survey of the subject with "Although circuit theory is more than 100 years old (Ohm's law, 1827; Kirchoff's laws, 1845)..." He clearly considers Ohm's law to be some kind of beginning although I doubt he would have used the phrase "true beginning".  Belevitch views it more as a slow evolution with a big explosion in the decade prior to World War I.
 * Belevitch, V, "Summary of the history of circuit theory", Proceedings of the IRE, vol 50, Iss 5, pp.848-855, May 1962.
 *  Sp in ni ng  Spark  08:40, 21 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Sounds like a good source to write it from. It's hard for me to imagine circuit analysis before Kirchhoff's laws.  Dicklyon (talk) 09:12, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Religion
The article states that Ohm's family was Protestant. The early 20th century writer and Fellow of the Royal Society Bertram Windle states that Ohm was probably Catholic: http://www.archive.org/stream/twelvecatholicme00windrich#page/74/mode/2up

Can someone more familiar with his life provide a reliable contemporary source for his religious beliefs?Akasseb (talk) 07:12, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Not born in Bavaria
When Georg Ohm was born in 1789 Erlangen was a part of the Principiality of Brandenburg-Bayreuth, which had nothing to do with Bavaria. Erlangen did not become part of the Kingdom of Bavaria until 1810, when Ohm was already in his twenties.

The following statements have to be changed accordingly:

"Georg Simon Ohm was born into a Protestant family in Erlangen, Bavaria" is false. Bavaria has to be exchanged with Brandenburg-Bayreuth.

The article also states under his portrait that he was born in "Erlangen, Electorate of Bavaria", which is also false, since Erlangen has never been part of the Electorate of Bavaria, it was only part of the Principiality of Brandenburg-Bayreuth (and after 1810 obviously of the Kingdom of Bavaria, not the Electorate). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:7C0:409:40E4:4878:C5C2:34D6:EC89 (talk) 09:47, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Acoustic law
The section says that Ohm's law is " It is well known to be not quite true." The citation corresponding to this is Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 25. In the review, the author refers to Foundations of Modern Auditory Theory by Jerry Tobias, which says that "for years musicians have been told that the ear is able to separate any complex signals into a series of sinusoidal signals - that is, it acts as a Fourier analyzer. This quarter-truth, known as Ohm's Other Law, has served to increase the distrust with which perceptive musicians regard scientists, since it is readily apparent to them that the ear acts in this way only under very restricted conditions"

So, is this all personal opinion? Has there been no quantified scientific study disproving the law? Is it true for perceptive musicians with trained ears, or is it true for any person in general? Does an average person hear by decomposing wave packets into sinusoidal waveforms? I don't think it is "well known to be not quite true" based on this citation alone. More data is needed.

Also, out of curiosity, how do musicians identify single notes? What is their calibration? Tuning forks? I presume one would need very sharp line-shapes. Astrokid (talk) 10:25, 1 February 2014 (UTC)


 * I don't think it is just personal opinion, although Tobias's combative statement is probably going too far. Real sounds are not made up of a set of continuous sine waves.  There is always a time-domain constraint on them.  This book makes the point that taking a Fourier transform over too long a period with real sounds (such as speech) gives nonsense results as far as the phase/intelligibility question goes.  Another effect not explained by Ohm's law is the perception of two tones very close together.  A beat is heard at a frequency which is neither of those tones, a phenomenon very well known to piano tuners who use it to good effect.  If you want a source for that see .  Another well known psycho-acoustic effect from music is covered in the same source.  This is the insistence of the ear to "hear" a fundamental that is not actually present deduced from the harmonics actually being played.
 * In answer to your question about musicians and single notes, some musicians have perfect pitch and can reproduce any given note at will without a reference. In an orchestra, musicians usually tune to the lead oboe player, see concert pitch.  One hopes the oboe has tuned his instrument accurately beforehand.  Spinning  Spark  12:46, 1 February 2014 (UTC)


 * It's pretty well known. No hearing scientist would support the idea that Ohm's acoustic law is true.  Even Helmholtz spent a lot of energy on trying to explain pitch phenomena that Ohm's approach could not, in an attempt to patch it up to be close to true.  Do a book search or scholar search on "ohm's acoustic law" and feel free to add what other sources say about it.  Cite my 1982 paper if you like.  Schroeder's attempt to make it more precise doesn't really make it much more true, it just expresses it more as what Ohm meant.  His "Schroeder phase" signals are one way to show that we are indeed sensitivie to relative phase in a periodic tone.  Another way is Patterson's ramped versus damped sinusoids.  Another would be John Robinson Pierce's pitch experiments reported here, in which phase differences can lead to a completely different pitch.  PDFs can be found online via google scholar Dicklyon (talk) 21:31, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
 * And as for "Does an average person hear by decomposing wave packets into sinusoidal waveforms?" No; that's not a concept that has any place in any but the most trivial characterization of hearing. It's more or less what Ohm and Helmholtz thought, and it's an idea that still pollutes popular presentations, but there is no sense in which it is accurate, useful, or predictive in understanding anything about hearing or music.  Dicklyon (talk) 21:36, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Reading Schroeder's paragraph right before section 9.3, I'm a little surprised that he gives the law as much credence as he does; at the same time, says it "admits occasional exceptions". So we do have a difference of opinion about emphasis at least.  The point is that there are a lot of phase manipulations you can do that people won't distinguish; and others that they will.  It's all explainable by a more detailed model of cochlea plus central processing of temporal structure.  It's not explainable in terms of Fourier amplitudes and phases.  See chapter 23 in this book.  Dicklyon (talk) 00:10, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

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"Georg" or "George"
The scientist's name is spelt as "Georg Simon Ohm" throughout the entirety of the Wikipedia page, and I believe that this is the correct spelling of his name. However, I noticed that the picture featured on the Wikipedia page has the scientist's name spelt as "George Simon Ohm" in its description. Whilst "Georg" is the Northern European version of the anglicised version of the name "George", I do not think both versions of the name should be used for his name in the same document, for reasons of continuity. I will be changing the picture's description to keep the spelling of his name constant throughout the document. I would be interested in other people's thoughts, and anyone's views about why both spelling should be included. SMargan (talk) 03:05, 13 October 2022 (UTC)

Nurembeg
It seems that he was also a professor at Technical Universuty in Nuremberg.

https://www.th-nuernberg.de/en/veranstaltungen/anniversary/ Pnti (talk) 10:56, 1 July 2023 (UTC)