The history of electromagnetic theory through the lives of its founders

Abstract

This engaging book presents the history of the development of the science of electromagnetism through the lives of two of its founders. The first seven chapters of this seventeen-chapter book belong to Michael Faraday, the story of whose rise to scientific prominence from an unprivileged background (his father was a blacksmith) is eternally appealing. Chapters eight through fifteen belong to James Clerk Maxwell, a truly great scientist whose name should be better known than it is. The book’s penultimate chapter introduces the ‘‘Maxwellians’’—the Britons Oliver Heaviside, Oliver Lodge, and George Francis Fitzgerald and their German colleague, Heinrich Hertz—and describes their achievements building on Maxwell’s and Faraday’s contributions. The final chapter takes us from Michelson and Morley’s 1887 experiment disproving the existence of the aether to Einstein’s annus mirabilis of 1905, in which, among other achievements, he explained the photoelectric effect, predicted the photon, and published his special theory of relativity. The book also contains a useful chronology of the main scientific breakthroughs covered in the book, as well as an eight-page insert of black-andwhite illustrations of not only the book’s two heroes at different times in their careers and of some of Faraday’s apparatus and laboratory, but also of William Thomson, who played a role in the life of each, and of other members of the tale’s dramatis personae, including Andre Marie Ampere, perhaps the most collegial of Faraday’s French colleagues; Faraday’s scientific hero and mentor Humphry Davy (though their relationship was ultimately damaged); Katherine Maxwell (who some considered his ‘‘awful wife’’); and the ‘‘Maxwellians’’ Heaviside and Hertz. In their acknowledgments, the authors share the book’s back story. As a graduate student in physics, one of the authors heard Nobel laureate C. N. Yang talk about the history of field theory, which led to major breakthroughs in modern physics and underlies the Standard Model. Yang traced field theory back to simple instruments