BOOK REVIEW
I started reading Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon's Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics with the intention of knowing Faraday for my further ease of the route to understand electromagnetism. It is the book produced by unification of Faraday's life (~27%), Maxwell's life (~27%), Heaviside's life and History of electromagnetism (~20%), and the development of electromagnetic theory along with other miscellaneous (statistics provided as per the book seen from kindle device). The book at the end provides remarkable photos of the giants, which finally produces the complete image of the person spoke by the book.
At the beginning i.e where the Faraday's life starts, I found the book to be insightful, and at the middle, when the life of Maxwell's life starts, it seemed to be the same what I read in Basil Mahon's other book "The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell" (I am not going to review this part as it already been done), then the book continues with little more about Oliver Heaviside's life and then at the last about the development of the electromagnetic field theory to the present. What is remarkable about the book is on how it gives the conceptual development of the concept.
As known the beginning of the book presented the Faraday's raise from the work of bookbinder to the famous experimental physicist. It is valuable to know what Faraday read when he was a book binder, and this book provides the books which Faraday read, they are "The Improvement of the Mind" by Issac Watts and "Converstations on Chemistry" by Jane Marcet. Then the story continues with Micheal Faraday joining Humphry Davy; and then going to the Grand Tour with Davy as his scientific assistant.
I liked the character of Faraday of not simply hearing or reading things but to try and experience them by himself. I understood from Faraday's simplicity and power, that the doing experiments is simple! I found the pattern of how the experiments go on, i.e with analogies, yes, with analogies Faraday and even Maxwell tried predicting things, for which they tried to see by experience, some times they worked and some times not. And this is the same analogical insights, or intuitive, or common sense predictions which helped to find the general theories, which then created the knowledge of electromagnetism. This quest for "generality" is of high significance, and this is the same generality is what drives one to go higher. The book at the end also shows on how this generality search is still going on for unifying all the forces. The book also speaks on keeping these mechanical models (example: Maxwell's vortices'), i.e the intuitive analogies, as a supporting stand for the stand/creation of theories by mathematics, which then should be removed. This is the main implicit philosophy which this book explains.
I don't know somewhat it gives confidence in seeing the life of Faraday and Maxwell, that we can also do things, I am not simply saying this, but I feel we can. The simple thing which everyone must know is everyone has the power of doing things! The book takes on Faraday's route to come out of every difficulty and presents his "work, write and publish" rule. As said before, he didn't stop by hearing what others had done, he used to experience it; and we should keep in mind that we should also try experiencing everything for understanding the world.
Faraday's skill of writing what he does, whether the experiment is successful or not, is of remarkable value, and his originality is also explicitly described by the book. Now I am eager to read his "Experimental Researches in Electricity" to see his own description of creative experiments.
The lines from the book which I like the most are: "As his (Faraday) ideas grew, language itself became part of his thinking. Each new word and each new phrase helped to clarify, even define, the underlying concept, even if that itself was not fully formed"
Some of the things which I didn't know before and found remarkable were that Oliver Heaviside was the one who summarised Maxwell's eight quaternion equations into four now famous equations; Faraday was the one who started Christmas lectures; Charles Wheatstone ran away from giving lecture at Royal Institution; Davy was the discoverer of many elements; John Michell and Joseph Priestley demonstrated inverse square laws for magnetism and electricity respectively; Heaviside and Gibbs implemented Maxwell's theory with the vectors (which were the extractions from quaternions); Faraday, with the help of William Whewell, introduced many of the words like diamagnetic, paramagnetic, etc; Zeeman effect, Kerr effect and many others have their origin from Faraday's experiments; and many other things.
I started reading Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon's Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics with the intention of knowing Faraday for my further ease of the route to understand electromagnetism. It is the book produced by unification of Faraday's life (~27%), Maxwell's life (~27%), Heaviside's life and History of electromagnetism (~20%), and the development of electromagnetic theory along with other miscellaneous (statistics provided as per the book seen from kindle device). The book at the end provides remarkable photos of the giants, which finally produces the complete image of the person spoke by the book.
At the beginning i.e where the Faraday's life starts, I found the book to be insightful, and at the middle, when the life of Maxwell's life starts, it seemed to be the same what I read in Basil Mahon's other book "The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell" (I am not going to review this part as it already been done), then the book continues with little more about Oliver Heaviside's life and then at the last about the development of the electromagnetic field theory to the present. What is remarkable about the book is on how it gives the conceptual development of the concept.
As known the beginning of the book presented the Faraday's raise from the work of bookbinder to the famous experimental physicist. It is valuable to know what Faraday read when he was a book binder, and this book provides the books which Faraday read, they are "The Improvement of the Mind" by Issac Watts and "Converstations on Chemistry" by Jane Marcet. Then the story continues with Micheal Faraday joining Humphry Davy; and then going to the Grand Tour with Davy as his scientific assistant.
I liked the character of Faraday of not simply hearing or reading things but to try and experience them by himself. I understood from Faraday's simplicity and power, that the doing experiments is simple! I found the pattern of how the experiments go on, i.e with analogies, yes, with analogies Faraday and even Maxwell tried predicting things, for which they tried to see by experience, some times they worked and some times not. And this is the same analogical insights, or intuitive, or common sense predictions which helped to find the general theories, which then created the knowledge of electromagnetism. This quest for "generality" is of high significance, and this is the same generality is what drives one to go higher. The book at the end also shows on how this generality search is still going on for unifying all the forces. The book also speaks on keeping these mechanical models (example: Maxwell's vortices'), i.e the intuitive analogies, as a supporting stand for the stand/creation of theories by mathematics, which then should be removed. This is the main implicit philosophy which this book explains.
I don't know somewhat it gives confidence in seeing the life of Faraday and Maxwell, that we can also do things, I am not simply saying this, but I feel we can. The simple thing which everyone must know is everyone has the power of doing things! The book takes on Faraday's route to come out of every difficulty and presents his "work, write and publish" rule. As said before, he didn't stop by hearing what others had done, he used to experience it; and we should keep in mind that we should also try experiencing everything for understanding the world.
Faraday's skill of writing what he does, whether the experiment is successful or not, is of remarkable value, and his originality is also explicitly described by the book. Now I am eager to read his "Experimental Researches in Electricity" to see his own description of creative experiments.
The lines from the book which I like the most are: "As his (Faraday) ideas grew, language itself became part of his thinking. Each new word and each new phrase helped to clarify, even define, the underlying concept, even if that itself was not fully formed"
Some of the things which I didn't know before and found remarkable were that Oliver Heaviside was the one who summarised Maxwell's eight quaternion equations into four now famous equations; Faraday was the one who started Christmas lectures; Charles Wheatstone ran away from giving lecture at Royal Institution; Davy was the discoverer of many elements; John Michell and Joseph Priestley demonstrated inverse square laws for magnetism and electricity respectively; Heaviside and Gibbs implemented Maxwell's theory with the vectors (which were the extractions from quaternions); Faraday, with the help of William Whewell, introduced many of the words like diamagnetic, paramagnetic, etc; Zeeman effect, Kerr effect and many others have their origin from Faraday's experiments; and many other things.
Comments
Post a Comment