Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics by Nancy Forbes (PDF)

Description

The story of two brilliant nineteenth-century scientists who discovered the electromagnetic field, laying the groundwork for the amazing technological and theoretical breakthroughs of the twentieth centuryTwo of the boldest and most creative scientists of all time were Michael Faraday (1791-1867) and James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879). This is the story of how these two men – separated in age by forty years – discovered the existence of the electromagnetic field and devised a radically new theory which overturned the strictly mechanical view of the world that had prevailed since Newton’s time.The authors, veteran science writers with special expertise in physics and engineering, have created a lively narrative that interweaves rich biographical detail from each man’s life with clear explanations of their scientific accomplishments. Faraday was an autodidact, who overcame class prejudice and a lack of mathematical training to become renowned for his acute powers of experimental observation, technological skills, and prodigious scientific imagination. James Clerk Maxwell was highly regarded as one of the most brilliant mathematical physicists of the age. He made an enormous number of advances in his own right. But when he translated Faraday’s ideas into mathematical language, thus creating field theory, this unified framework of electricity, magnetism and light became the basis for much of later, 20th-century physics.Faraday’s and Maxwell’s collaborative efforts gave rise to many of the technological innovations we take for granted today – from electric power generation to television, and much more. Told with panache, warmth, and clarity, this captivating story of their greatest work – in which each played an equal part – and their inspiring lives will bring new appreciation to these giants of science.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “It’s just the best book of its kind I have ever read, and I just hugely enjoyed it. Couldn’t put it down. [Their discovery] was a fabulous human achievement.”—Charlie Munger, Vice-Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Corporation, on CNBC’s Squawk Box“Compelling. …A lively account of the men and their times and a brilliant exposition of the scientific circumstances and significance of their work.”—Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW“The life and science of these two giants of nineteenth-century physics is beautifully documented and narrated in this riveting book.”—Eric D’Hoker, Distinguished Professor of Physics, UCLA; past president, Aspen Center for Physics“If it is possible for a book about the electromagnetic field to be a ‘page turner,’ then this book is one! . . . This conceptual approach to what can be a daunting topic . . . makes the thinking of these great scientists accessible to all. I highly recommend this book for anyone with a passion for science.” —NSTA Recommends“Perhaps the names of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell aren’t as well known as Newton or Einstein, but they should be. The book traces their amazing collaboration…. But as equally fascinating as the tale of the discovery is that of the men behind it…. A fascinating true tale of the lives of two essential men of physics!” —AstroGuyz “Blends science history and lively biography. …Accessible writing and a feel for character make this an interesting look at two scientists whose work defined an era and set the course for modern physics.”—Publishers Weekly“Fans of biographies, as well as anyone interested in science and technology…will enjoy reading about these ‘two modest and genial men whose combined endeavors changed the world.’”—Library Journal About the Author Nancy Forbes is an experienced science writer with over twenty-five publications in the area of science and technology including Imitation of Life: How Biology Is Inspiring Computing. She has also served as a contributing editor for The Industrial Physicist of the American Institute of Physics, and IEEE’s Computing in Science and Engineering. Currently, she works for the US Department of Defense.Basil Mahon is the author of The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell and Oliver Heaviside: Maverick Mastermind of Electricity, among other publications. With degrees in engineering and statistics, Mahon was formerly an officer in the Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and until his retirement worked for the British Government Statistical Service. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. IntroductionIt is 1888. Picture a large, sparsely furnished room. It has stout wooden tables and workbenches — a laboratory of some kind — but there are no retorts, Bunsen burners, or flasks of brightly colored liquid. Instead, the room is stocked with curious metal devices that have strange names: Rhümkorff coils, Knochenhauer spirals, Wheatstone bridges. Their purpose is to probe the ways of the mysterious invisible phenomenon — electricity.The room has a single occupant, a young man, handsome, neatly suited, and dark-haired with a close-trimmed beard and moustache. He is deftly assembling some apparatus on one of the long wooden tables. At one end he has constructed a circuit that will produce electric sparks across a narrow air gap between two metal spheres connected to the ends of the wires in the circuit. Ordinarily air doesn’t conduct electricity but, if the two spheres are close together and the voltage is high enough, a spark will appear to jump across the gap, although it is really a series of very rapid sparks that jump back and forth, or oscillate, between the spheres. To each sphere he has attached a metal rod connected to a rectangular metal plate — he has learned that this will alter the frequency of oscillation. He presses a key to activate the circuit, and vivid blue sparks crackle across the gap between the spheres.So far, so good; his primary circuit works, as it had the day before and the day before that. He turns his attention to a separate part of the apparatus that he calls his detector — a simple loop of wire with a very small gap between its ends that he can adjust with a screw. He holds the detector close to the sparking primary circuit, and faint sparks appear across its own gap. This happens, he reasons, when waves of energy pass from the primary circuit to the detector.All this is familiar ground to him, but the next steps are untried and will, he hopes, be decisive ones. Switching off the primary circuit for the moment, he props up a large zinc sheet in a vertical position at the far end of the table. Its purpose is to act as a reflector, like a mirror. He places the detector on the table between the primary circuit and the zinc reflecting sheet, closes the blinds, waits for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, and then switches on his primary circuit. Turning his back on the sparks scintillating between the spheres, he looks for tiny sparks between the terminals of his detector. They appear, faint but unmistakable. Now for the step that will, if successful, establish the result he is seeking. He looks to see if the brightness of the sparks varies as he moves the detector slowly away from the primary circuit toward the reflecting zinc sheet. Indeed, it does. The sparks diminish to nothing, then grow again to their brightest, and then the cycle repeats. He knows that when any kind of wave is reflected back toward its source, it forms a standing wave, which appears to vibrate in place, like a guitar string. Hence, waves are being produced by the primary circuit and reflected by the zinc sheet. This is exactly what he wanted to find. Heinrich Hertz, professor of experimental physics at the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe, has made one of the greatest experimental discoveries in the history of science: he has proved beyond doubt the existence of electromagnetic waves.As Guglielmo Marconi and others were soon to show, the commercial value of Hertz’s discovery was immense. But he had no notion of this, nor, indeed, of any practical application. What had captivated Hertz and set him on his quest was a beguiling but strange scientific idea — the brainchild of British experimentalist Michael Faraday in the 1830s that had been raised into a full mathematical theory by the young Scot James Clerk Maxwell three decades later. Their idea was so different from anything that had gone before that many of the leading men of the time dismissed it as a flight of fancy. Others were simply baffled; they did not know what to make of it. But to Hertz it was a beautiful idea that rang true. All it lacked was physical proof, and his quest was to supply experimental evidence that would put the matter beyond dispute.From the time of Newton, leading scientists had believed that the universe was governed by mechanical laws: material objects held energy and inflicted forces. To them, the surrounding space was nothing more than a passive backdrop. The extraordinary idea put forward by Faraday and Maxwell was that space itself acted as a repository of energy and a transmitter of forces: it was home to something that pervades the physical world yet was inexplicable in Newtonian terms — the electromagnetic field.Faraday’s first notion of lines of force, much derided at the time, grew into Maxwell’s sophisticated mathematical theory, which predicted that every time a magnet jiggled, or an electric current was turned on or off, a wave of electromagnetic energy would spread out into space like a ripple on a pond, changing the nature of space itself. Maxwell calculated the speed of the waves from the elementary properties of electricity and magnetism, and it turned out to be the very speed at which light had been measured. He surmised that visible light is just a small band in a vast spectrum of electromagnetic waves, all traveling at the same speed but with wavelengths that might range from nanometers to kilometers. All this remained just a theory with more skeptics than adherents until a quarter of a century later, when Hertz emphatically verified it by producing and detecting what we would now call shortwave radio waves in his laboratory. The door to previously unimaginable regions of scientific knowledge was opened.It is almost impossible to overstate the scale of Faraday and Maxwell’s achievement in bringing the concept of the electromagnetic field into human thought. It united electricity, magnetism, and light into a single, compact theory; changed our way of life by bringing us radio, television, radar, satellite navigation, and mobile phones; inspired Einstein’s special theory of relativity; and introduced the idea of field equations, which became the standard form used by today’s physicists to model what goes on in the vastness of space and inside atoms.Faraday and Maxwell have attracted their share of biographers, and rightly so. Aside from their genius, both were admirable, generous-spirited men who conducted their science with infectious enthusiasm and exuded the kind of charm that made people feel better about themselves and the world in general. But perhaps even more compelling than their individual life stories is the way that the two men from totally different backgrounds — a self-taught son of a poor blacksmith and a Cambridge-educated son of a Scottish laird — were brought together by their curiosity about the physical world and their determination to find out how it works. Although they met only late in Faraday’s life, they formed a tremendously strong bond — they were united by their willingness to challenge entrenched scientific customs and conventions. The theory of the electromagnetic field is their joint creation and has its own story, intertwined with theirs and with its own set of diverse supporting characters. There were, for example, the American rake Count Rumford, who was instrumental in founding the Royal Institution, which gave employment to the impecunious, young Faraday; the brilliant but vain Humphry Davy, who was Faraday’s inspiring mentor; the maverick Oliver Heaviside, who summarized Maxwell’s theory into the four famous “Maxwell’s equations”; and the hardworking Oliver Lodge, who discovered waves along wires but found he had been comprehensively scooped by Hertz.Welcome to the story of the electromagnetic field. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Combining two biographies, those of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, is a good device for telling the story of an era in science. The subjects’ working lives span most of the 19th century. Though they came from different backgrounds, the two had quite a bit in common. They were incredibly hard-working. The authors go out of their way to tell how genuinely kind they were. They had a true knack for making friends and avoiding long-lasting enmities. The third virtue was of course incredible intelligence. But it seems hardly likely that Englishman of the 19th century alone her were more gifted than other populations and times. Something about that epoch allowed genius to flourish, to reveal itself fully. That epoch is the subject of this rather remarkable book.Faraday was born as of a poor second generation blacksmith from the North Country. He had the good fortune to arrive in London at a time when the city was intellectually very alive. He could bounce between low-paying jobs giving people a chance to notice and take advantage of his talent. One of the most fortunate postings was as a book binder. The work was not mentally demanding, but it put young Faraday in contact with books. He loved to read, and quickly became quite well informed. It also put him in such with the customers for the books, some of whom took note of the young man’s alertness and talents. It was not too long before he became an apprentice to the famous scientist Humphry Davy, who brought him along rather quicklyAmong Faraday’s attributes was being meticulous, faulting himself deeply when he failed to put out work of the quality he expected of himself. He was kind and generous, and extremely apologetic when he accidentally gave offense, as he did one a couple of occasions. It was a Christian era, and although his religiosity does not appear to have expressed itself as such, it was expressed through the way he interacted with his fellow man. The authors do not report any conflicts between science and religion in Faraday’s life.Faraday lived a long life, toward the end of which he dealt with increasing lapses of memory. It did not affect his character; he remained conscientious to the end.The second subject, James Clerk Maxwell, was born into more comfortable circumstances, in Scotland. His accent set him apart throughout his life. He had more easy access to the university, but still had to be propelled by mentors who were attracted to his talent and guided him to the very center of intellectual life of the times, Cambridge, where he truly shone.Maxwell, per the book, had manifested great intellect at an early age. He was extremely close to his father, who guided his early education. He published his first paper, on the use of string and fixed foci to draw complex geometric figures, when he was only fourteen. He continued to work a number of areas, including his of light, vibration, and eventually electricity and magnetism. Another early paper won him a prize while at the university: he concluded, using an elaborate mathematical argument based on the physical properties he could assume for solid disks, liquid, and independently orbiting rocks, that Saturn’s rings had to be formed from the latter. Later, one of his mentors introduced him to Faraday’s writing, the deeply perceptive observations in which had yet to be explained mathematically.Each of the men had shortcomings. Faraday never mastered mathematics. He was never able to find a mathematical language to as a vehicle to express his marvelous intuitions and the observations made in the course of his many experiments. Maxwell, on the other hand, was a great natural mathematician, preferably effortlessly coming in second in the manual mathematics competition at Cambridge, to E. J. Routh, a man who later became -renowned as a mathematician.Maxwell’s shortcoming was his inability, despite the generous good nature, to express himself cogently in an oral presentation. He wandered. He compensated for this with the precision of his writing, which the authors say made his observations of pleasure to read, and attracted him a great worldwide base of admirers.The book does not budget many words for describing the men’s personal lives. Both were married, Faraday quite happily and successfully, Maxwell to a women with whom others found to be rather shrewish but took good care of her husband. One of the young Faraday’s nemeses was the wife of his mentor, Humphry Davy. She was a snobbish, overbearing and even jealous woman who made a point of putting Faraday down for his peasant roots. It is a credit to the young Faraday that he accepted all of this for general good humor. That said, the stories of personal lives are rather brief, and one should look to other biographies for more depth.Where the authors shine is in presenting the scientific work of the two men. A temptation with a work like this would be to dumb down the explanations in the expectation that the average reader will not understand them. That expectation would be valid with respect to me. I know quite a bit about science, but many of the explanations went over my head. I only half grasped them. I’m confident, however, from the part that I do grasp and from the style in which it is written that it is a thorough and competent exposition of the ideas of these great men. I expect that it will be a satisfaction to people who have a better grounding in science see these thoughts so well expressed.The latter chapters of the book discuss the great names in physics who built upon Maxwell’s theories. An initial inertia followed Maxwell’s death. Maxwell had not sought to confirm his theories by experiment at the Cavendish. His thousand page treatise on electricity was rather daunting, the field notes of the first explorer and a new field, not organized well for study.However, a handful of scientists, here called the Maxwellians, plowed through Maxwell’s work and devised experiments to validate his theories. Two of the theories which had to be laid to rest were the idea of action at a distance, exemplified by gravity, then the existence or nonexistence of the aether. The series of brilliant experiments proved Maxwell to be right, and expanded his ideas to make them the foundation of physics. We are familiar with the names of many of the men involved: Lord Kelvin, Lorentz, Hertz, Heaviside and Michaelson are among them.Let me note one error which escaped the technical editors. The speed of light is 300 million meters per second, not kilometers.There is a quote from Einstein. Given the proposition that he had stood on the shoulders of giants such as Newton he replied, no, he had stood on the shoulders of Maxwell. Maxwell had stood on Faraday’s shoulders, and Faraday on Newton’s. The final chapter puts Einstein into the context of his time. Others were working with ideas such as the special theory of relativity, but Einstein had had the insights required to distill it down to very succinct formulations and proofs. In retrospect Einstein is often portrayed as a solitary genius. No, he was in the midst of contemporary streams of thought, distinguishing himself as a man who could see more and clarify things better than others, but strongly helped by the fervid climate of experimentation and the discoveries of others.It is extraordinary that Great Britain produced so many great men in the 19th century. Producing great science is a matter not only of genius, but of opportunity. One of the observations the authors make is that both these men were polymaths. They succeeded a number of fields, some quite practical such as architecture, and in several different disciplines within the sciences. This was not uncommon. Benjamin Franklin in the previous century had likewise been a great natural scientist, biologist, and physicist, among many other things. Such was the nature of the times that there was a small enough body of knowledge that it was possible to be really well read in a number of branches.The author describes at some length how the men’s experiences in different branches of science reinforced their intuitions electricity and magnetism, which is the main focus of this work. They were men who were used to working with their hands. They observed electricity in living fish and dead frogs. They were of course familiar with Newtonian physics, and with Bernoulli’s fluid dynamics. James Clerk Maxwell wrote a philosophical article in his college days on the use of analogy in explaining the natural world. He made extensive use of analogies, such as between the flows of electricity and water.An altogether engrossing book. It raises questions in my mind comparing the science of today with that of the 19th century. We seem not to be producing many young scientists of this caliber anymore, despite the fact that the schools have constructed a virtual dragnet to identify talented minds at the earliest possible age. Why not is the subject for an essay, which I may latter append to this review. (NB – this is done – it is the third comment below).

⭐Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics by Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon“Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field” is an excellent, readable book on the life and contributions of two science giants, Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. Authors Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon join forces to provide the public a very enjoyable look at how the these two scientists built from successive ideas and discovered the electromagnetic field. This interesting 330-page book includes seventeen chapters, notes, a formal bibliography and an index.Positives:1. Professionally written science biographies blended into one accessible narrative.2. The fascinating topic of the scientists behind the electromagnetic field.3. The authors have great mastery of the topic but most importantly were able create an interesting narrative without resorting to the complex mathematics involved in physics and in particular, electromagnetism.4. Good use of diagrams to complement the excellent narrative.5. An excellent introduction that teases the public of what’s to come. “It is almost impossible to overstate the scale of Faraday and Maxwell’s achievement in bringing the concept of the electromagnetic field into human thought. It united electricity, magnetism, and light into a single, compact theory; changed our way of life by bringing us radio, television, radar, satellite navigation, and mobile phones; inspired Einstein’s special theory of relativity; and introduced the idea of field equations, which became the standard form used by today’s physicists to model what goes on in the vastness of space and inside atoms.”6. In essence this book is the story of the electromagnetic field that is brought to you by blending the biographies of Faraday and Maxwell in chronological order.7. Throughout the book, the authors methodically and chronologically go through the lives of the scientists involved as new discoveries lead to scientific knowledge.8. A look at the history of electricity and magnetism. “Before 1800, all man-made electricity was static. The discovery of continuous currents came as a complete surprise and was in the best tradition of scientific serendipity.”9. The fascinating life of Michael Faraday, his strengths and weaknesses as a scientist. “We shall never know what Faraday would have achieved had he mastered mathematics, but, paradoxically, his ignorance may have been an advantage. It led him to derive his theories entirely from experimental observation rather than to deduce them from mathematical models.”10. Some of the world’s greatest inventions are highlighted in this book. “This time, the magnet revolved around the wire! Faraday had become a discoverer: he had made the world’s first electric motor.”11. This book is intended for the laypersons but it doesn’t cheat those us in the STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) fields. The concepts are well described and satisfying. “The “quantity of electricity thrown into a current” was “directly as the amount of curves intersected.” This statement was true whether the curves were dense or sparse, converging or diverging, and neither the shape of the wire nor its mode of motion made any difference, except that the direction of the current depended on what became known as the right-hand rule. It was the original statement of one of the most fundamental laws of electromagnetism—now called simply Faraday’s law of induction.”12. The genius of James Clerk Maxwell and how he was able to describe such esoteric concepts particularly for those times. “Maxwell’s imaginary fluid was weightless, friction-free, and incompressible. This last property was the key to the analogy. It meant that the fluid had its own built-in inverse-square law: the speed of a particle of fluid flowing directly outward from a point source was inversely proportional to the square of its distance from the source.”13. Fascinating look at how Maxwell fed from Faraday’s own genius to take these concepts to a better understanding. “As Faraday had found, these substances varied in their ability to conduct electric lines of force—each had its own specific inductive capacity. For example, glass conducted electric lines of force more readily than wood. In his model, Maxwell accommodated this property simply by endowing each substance with the appropriate amount of resistance to fluid flow—the lower the resistance, the smaller the pressure gradient necessary to produce a given speed of flow.”14. The authors capture the essence of these great scientists and help readers gain a better understanding of who they were. “Though surpassed by his later writings, Maxwell’s “On Faraday’s Lines of Force”10 is, surely, one of the finest examples of creative thought in the history of science. In his book James Clerk Maxwell: Physicist and Natural Philosopher, Francis Everitt shrewdly characterizes Faraday as a cumulative thinker, Thomson as an inspirational thinker, and Maxwell as an architectural thinker. Maxwell had not only found a way to express Faraday’s ideas in mathematical language but also built a foundation for still-greater work yet to come.”15. Goes over Maxwell’s manifesto, which was to produce a theory that explained all the known experimental laws of electricity and magnetism by deduction from general principles.16. Key concepts explained and differentiated, “Maxwell distinguished between two kinds of energy held by the field: electric energy was potential energy, like that in a coiled spring; and magnetic energy was kinetic, or “actual” energy, like that in a flywheel.” “Maxwell had achieved the seemingly impossible—he had derived the theory of the electromagnetic field directly from the laws of dynamics.”17. A look at the Maxwellians. “He straightaway wrote to Lodge to ask for a full text of his talk and soon found that he had another admirer, Lodge’s friend George Francis Fitzgerald, who was professor of natural and experimental philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin. Like Heaviside, Lodge and Fitzgerald had been captivated by Maxwell’s work and both had been trying, first in isolation and then with mutual support, to carry it on. Now Heaviside, the independent recluse, had gained true friendship on his own terms, and the three of them, united in a common cause, became firm friends and formed the core of the group that came to be called the Maxwellians.”18. Einstein’s admiration for Maxwell. “As Einstein put it: Since Maxwell’s time, physical reality has been thought of as represented by continuous fields and not capable of any mechanical interpretation. This change in the conception of reality is the most profound and fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton.”19. Provides a timeline and a photo insert.20. Notes and an invaluable formal bibliography.Negatives:1. The supplementary material that is included is good but limited. I would have included a list of all the scientists listed in this book and their discoveries. A helpful timeline is included but an additional supplements add value to the book.2. Even at it’s most accessible, if you don’t have much interest in science, this book will be difficult to get through. Not really a negative of the book just a reality check for onlookers.In summary, this is an excellent book that the layperson will enjoy and those in the field will cherish. The authors did a wonderful job of focusing on the grand work of these curious, driven scientists without obfuscating the narrative with esoteric equations. What a wonderful way to learn about the lives of two of the most significant scientists of the 19th century and their grand contributions to our lives today. I highly recommend it!Further recommendations: “The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell” by Basil Mahon, “The Electric Life of Michael Faraday” by Alan Hirshfeld, “Isaac Newton” by James Gleick, “Planck” by Brandon R. Brown, “QED” by Richard Feynman, “Seven Brief Lessons on Physics” by Carlo Rovelli, “Tesla” by W. Bernard Carlson, “Einstein: His Life and Universe” by Walter Isaacson, and “Gravity” and “The Great Physicists from Galileo to Einstein” by George Gamow.

⭐Used it to enhance my own knowledge and help prepare a grad-level lecture. A delight to read!

⭐Excellent book. I had always thought that Faraday’s sole contribution to the development of the science of Electricity & Magnetism was simply that he waggled a magnet near a wire and saw a compass needle move. Wrong ! Read the book and be enthralled by his story. A whole lifetime of empirical results produced from meticulous experiments, laid the entire foundations on which every practical application of Electricity and Magnetism was built.After Faraday’s story comes Maxwell’s science and the mathematics. When Maxwell first produced his theory, the majority of scientists didn’t understand it. And I certainly struggled ( unsuccessfully ) with it when I was doing A level physics many years ago. The authors have made a really good attempt to explain it all and I’m now in that place where having read the text I think I have understood it all, but can’t explain it to anyone else ! (if you read science books, you must have been there before !).

⭐I bought this book in the hope (expectation?) that it would be an integrated biography of these two men especially with regard to their scientific work. Having read biographies of Faraday I was not particularly interested to read his life story again but the unification of his work with that of Maxwell was of real interest. However, that is not the case. If you have read or possess Mahon’s book ‘The Man who Changed Everything’ then you possess or have already read three-fifths of this book. Mahon’s book is alright, a bit pedestrian and it does include some science but it is not worth having two of. The Forbes part has not been produced elsewhere as far as I can tell but it is not much over a hundred pages and there is strong competition. I don’t know what its like and I shan’t bother to read it. This is an expensive book at full price. Buyer Beware!

⭐I enjoyed this book, especially the first half about Faraday which I found highly absorbing. I felt that Chapter 12 required a bit of effort to understand the given exposition of Maxwell’s current-and-idler-wheel model, even though I was already familiar with it from reading the original papers. Perhaps this could have been less detailed for a popular readership or the explanation omitted altogether since Maxwell did abandon it and it is not essential to the understanding of his equations which is what he actually left us. Nevertheless, I recommend buying this book.

⭐A fair account of two great physicists. I would have liked more effort spent on Maxwell’s Equations of Electromagnetism. They are described in a ‘literary’ way, but the authors fight shy of the mathematics. One solution would have been to put some detail into an appendix. More diagrams would also have been an improvement.

⭐Book review: Faraday, Maxwell and The Electromagnetic Field by Nancy Forbes & Basil MahonAll of us know Faraday and Maxwell from high school physics and think of them as geniuses. While that is evidently true, that is a limited perspective as we only studied what they discovered. This book is about how they went about finding what they discovered, and reveals them to be geniuses in an entirely different (and more useful) sense. Both demonstrated an extraordinary degree of integrity, pragmatism and intellectual humility in their work and at least for me, this was something that I neither realized nor appreciated until I read this book. While we’ll never be geniuses in the first sense, we can at least aspire to Faraday and Maxwell’s ideal in the second sense of the term. I’ll limit this review to these new facets that I didn’t know earlier and not to their work itself (which is not to imply that I got Maxwell’s equations at any point in my life).Faraday was a poor blacksmith’s son and never attended school. His first job was as a bookbinder’s assistant. He attended free science lectures in his spare time, took meticulous notes and even tried to replicate a few experiments. He so impressed people around him that he was gifted tickets to attend a lecture series of Humphry Davy, who was considered Britain’s foremost chemist at that time. His notes and dedication again impressed Davy, who offered him the only job he had – that of a bottle washer, essentially cleaning up a chemistry lab after the experiments were done. Faraday jumped at this opportunity as he knew what apprenticing under Davy was worth. In fact, for a while, he also doubled up at Davy’s valet. To Davy’s credit, he saw Faraday’s potential and Faraday soon graduated from being Davy’s collaborator in chemistry experiments to being an independent chemist himself. Chemistry was the cutting edge of science in that time and both Faraday and Davy simply aimed to operate at that frontier. Once Volta demonstrated the first electric battery, the frontier shifted from chemistry to electricity and both men simply followed the shifting frontier.Faraday was an unusually gifted experimental scientist, probably the best the world has seen. However, he was unusual in another sense as well – he was exceptionally meticulous not just in experiments, but also in honest record-keeping. He did something very rare – he wrote down equally detailed notes when an experiment failed or yielded a non-result as he did when an experiment succeeded. He then published all his notes, including countless experiments where he ran into dead-ends. His was probably the most unbiased and honest scientific record ever published.He had one huge weakness that ended up working to his advantage. His lack of formal education meant that he never worked on or followed higher-level mathematics. Despite being the foremost experimental scientist in electromagnetism, he never published a formal theory on the same and also held back criticizing other scientists who theorized in mathematical terms despite not having a fraction of the empirical experience that Faraday had. Personally, I speculate that mathematics was never beyond Faraday but he was put off by it being a strange, unfamiliar language. Ironically, the fancy theoreticians could think only in Newtonian terms – instantaneous action-at-distance between point objects along straight lines, a la gravity. Faraday was unburdened by this legacy and articulated the view that was ultimately proven correct – electromagnetic fields, with curved lines of force permeating all of space, with electromagnetic waves travelling at a finite speed. He was the first to see light as an electromagnetic wave and ran clever experiments to polarize light using currents and magnets. It was astounding that the least mathematical scientist also had the correct theoretical understanding of this brave new world, entirely on the strength of instincts honed by experiments and observation.Maxwell’s intellect was unmatched. At 14, he published a paper on geometry that was better than Descartes treatment of the same topic. He could pick up any topic and hold his own against the world’s best in that area. During a phase when Electromagnetism was his day-job, he also happened to be the foremost expert on the kinetic theory of gases (along with Boltzmann). However, the book brings out Maxwell’s second genius – as a diligent experimenter, who despite his genius, always placed experimental evidence over (even his) theory. He was very tentative in his theorizing, always clarifying that this was merely a way to model the world and need not be how the world actually worked. After proposing his kinetic theory of gases, he realized that if one of his inferences failed the experimental test, the theory was untenable. He set up an elaborate experiment at home (aided only by his non-scientist wife) to measure effect of pressure on viscosity, to stress test his own theory. When Maxwell first became interested in electromagnetism, he read all published work on the topic. At the end of that, he concluded that Faraday’s work had the most integrity and any theory that he came up with had to conform to Faraday’s bullet-proof experimental results. This criteria led him away from Newtonian models and he eventually ended up framing the theoretical construct that formalized what Faraday proposed in terms of fields, flux and waves. He was the first to relate the speed of light to electromagnetic constants. Although these constants had been determined by others, he insisted on conducting an independent experiment to derive the values of these constants, to really test whether his theory worked in practice.Both men were also pragmatic and grounded way beyond what one would typically expect of academics finding their way through a whole new field. Both had ‘line jobs’. Faraday had to make the Royal Institution sustainably profitable, through creating a technical-consulting arm and popularizing its lectures. Maxwell had to set up Cambridge University’s science lab from scratch and make it self-sustaining. Both played key roles in debugging the first telegraph cables, including the first trans-Atlantic cable. Faraday did pioneering work on ensuring safety and reliability of every light-house in Britain. Maxwell came up with industry-standards and test-procedures to make sure that the nascent electrical industry could make reliable products. They gave evidence-based advice on topics as esoteric as to whether British military should use poison gas (No. Wind patterns could bring it right back) and whether oatmeal in military rations was contaminated. This real-world aspect of their roles made them even more grounded in evidence and reality.History shows how correct both men were in their world view of a nascent field that no one in the world fully understood in their time. This seems to be, not merely due to their innate genius, but also due to the extraordinary degree of integrity, intellectual honesty, humility, pragmatism, rigor and reality-testing that both men made central to their work. Carl Sagan wrote that science wasn’t merely a body of knowledge, but a way of thinking. This book illustrates the scientific way of thinking better than any other.

Keywords

Free Download Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics in PDF format
Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics PDF Free Download
Download Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics 2014 PDF Free
Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics 2014 PDF Free Download
Download Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics PDF
Free Download Ebook Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics