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Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics

Nancy Forbes,

Basil Mahon

4.25 · Rating details · 883 ratings · 103 reviews

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 century.

Two 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 th ...more

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Hardcover, 320 pages

Published March 11th 2014 by Prometheus Books (first published January 1st 2014)

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Feb 17, 2017 Max rated it it was amazing

Shelves: physics

Newton credited his success to “standing on the shoulders of giants”. A British reporter asked Albert Einstein if he had stood on the shoulders of Newton. Einstein replied, “That statement is not quite right; I stood on Maxwell’s shoulders.” Maxwell could be said to have stood on Faraday’s shoulders. Forbes and Mahon’s book lays out how they transformed physics paving the way for the momentous discoveries of the twentieth century.

Michael Faraday’s experiments with electricity and mag Newton credited his success to “standing on the shoulders of giants”. A British reporter asked Albert Einstein if he had stood on the shoulders of Newton. Einstein replied, “That statement is not quite right; I stood on Maxwell’s shoulders.” Maxwell could be said to have stood on Faraday’s shoulders. Forbes and Mahon’s book lays out how they transformed physics paving the way for the momentous discoveries of the twentieth century.

Michael Faraday’s experiments with electricity and magnetism led not only to the generator and electric motor, but a new understanding of how these forces worked. James Clerk Maxwell used Faraday’s findings to mathematically define the relationship between electricity and magnetism and in turn electromagnetic waves and the nature of light. Their work led to the breakthroughs of Planck, Einstein, Feynman and many others culminating in modern field theories including today’s Standard Model.

Faraday was born into a poor London family. As a bookbinder’s apprentice he seized the opportunity to read and educate himself. Fascinated by science he secured a lowly position helping the famous chemist Humphrey Davy at the Royal Institution. With hard work he established himself as a respected scientist, despite his lowly origins in a classist society. His unusual background for a scientist of the times would enable him to see things in ways others did not. With no education in mathematics or Newtonian principles, he relied on his disciplined keen observations, basing his ideas solely on his experimental results. He supported his work with meticulous notes and publications.

In 1800 Alessandro Volta invented the battery. Now electric current could readily be produced at will. Twenty years later Hans Christian Oersted showed that electric current caused a magnetic needle to move aligning itself at a right angle to the wire. Faraday then built a primitive form of electric motor, in which a magnet moved continuously around an electric wire. Faraday experimented with electricity and magnetism for years discovering electromagnetic induction. Unencumbered by thoughts of Newton’s instantaneous action at a distance or Kant’s theory of attraction and repulsion, Faraday recognized that circular “lines of force”, a term he coined, mediated magnetism and electricity.

In 1830 Faraday built a dynamo, in which a metal disc spinning in between a horseshoe magnet generated electric current. Faraday had realized that the lines of force were an electric field and that if an electric field could induce a magnetic one, the reverse would also be true. He reached these conclusions without mathematics. He was able to picture this force as waves similar to light or sound. His publications explaining his discoveries contained no formulas.

In 1845 a young prodigy, William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), read Faraday’s publications. Other scientists did not really believe Faraday’s lines of force were real. The seventeen year old Thomson did describing them in a paper with the same mathematics used to depict the flow of heat through a metal bar. That same year Faraday first used the term “magnetic field” in describing his experiments. He also gave a rare talk about his beliefs which he knew would be ridiculed. He postulated vibrating electric and magnetic lines of force pervading the universe with no need of the commonly accepted aether. The vibrations which he called “Ray-vibrations” were the lines of force. Light was a manifestation of these vibrations.

As expected, Faraday’s “magnetic field” and “lines of force” were quickly dismissed by his peers. William Thomson moved on to other things, but in the 1850’s he suggested to a young James Clerk Maxwell that he read Faraday’s publications. In 1857 Maxwell published his findings on Faraday’s theory. Faraday was thrilled to find a brilliant mathematically trained scientist embrace his ideas. Maxwell compared the movement of an electric field to that of fluids. It moved from areas of high potential to low just as fluid moved from higher pressure to low. Adapting mathematics used to describe the flow of fluids he was able to encapsulate Faraday’s lines of force in a way more familiar to conventional scientists.

Maxwell, born in 1831 in Scotland, was forty years younger than Faraday but blossomed quickly. He graduated from Cambridge, won the highly competitive Smith Prize and became a fellow of Trinity College. He wrote his paper reformulating Faraday’s ideas mathematically and moved on to the Chair of Natural Philosophy at Marischal College in his native Scotland. He was now twenty-five. In his late twenties he won the Adams Prize for showing mathematically that Saturn’s rings must be composed of small separate bodies (as seen later by the Voyager and Cassini space missions). He also formulated the first statistical law in physics, the Maxwell distribution of molecular speeds, paving the way for research in thermodynamics and the use of probability distributions in quantum mechanics.

In 1862 Maxwell wrote a new paper on electromagnetism extending his prior work. Constructing an elaborate mechanical model, he depicted how an electric field could induce a magnetic one which in turn would induce an electric one repeating ad infinitum. With the supporting math he formulated the electromagnetic wave and validated Faraday’s original idea of “Ray-vibrations” from his 1845 speech. Just as with Faraday’s ideas, Maxwell’s were not well received by his peers. His mechanical model was seen as ludicrous. Maxwell said the model was imaginary serving only as an aid to thought, a visualization that helped him develop the mathematics. With that math he calculated the speed of the waves and found them to be the same (within experimental error) as existing measurements of light thus showing both to be the same phenomenon.

Maxwell wrote a subsequent paper without employing any mechanical model, relying on Lagrangian math to show the interactions of the electromagnetic fields. He eschewed the accepted notion of action at a distance showing that the local action of the field explained experimental results. The math proved the waves existence even if we did not know any underlying reality. In a significant departure from accepted practice Maxwell held that a physical hypothesis was not necessary. Presenting his ideas to The Royal Society in 1864, he found little support. Few could understand his math which employed three dimensional vectors. He had dismissed the universally accepted aether without offering any physical alternative. It would be decades before the significance of Maxwell’s achievement would be recognized. Unfortunately Michael Faraday, suffering from dementia, was unable to appreciate Maxwell’s work. He died in 1867 at the age of 75.

In a separate effort writing a book on heat, Maxwell conceptualized what William Thomson called “Maxwell’s demon”, a thought experiment which is still discussed in the study of thermodynamics. Then Maxwell took the job to build, set up, open (1874) and be the first administrator of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, which would be the workplace of famous scientists like Ernest Rutherford, James Watson and many more. In 1879 Maxwell died of cancer, only 48 years old. After his death, a few believers, the Maxwellians, took up his work. One, Oliver Heaviside, simplified the math reducing it to four essential equations, the ones in textbooks today. In Germany in 1888 Heinrich Hertz first demonstrated the waves experimentally, for which The Royal Society awarded him The Rumford Medal. Guglielmo Marconi put the waves to practical use and in 1901 transmitted radio waves from Cornwall to Newfoundland.

Maxwell’s work invoked local action, dismissed action at a distance, eviscerated the aether, proved electromagnetic fields and waves, and showed that reality could be represented by math alone; all ideas essential for twentieth century physics. As Einstein put it, “One scientific epoch ended and another began with James Clerk Maxwell.” Einstein elaborated, “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.” Interestingly in his formulation of electrodynamics, Richard Feynman went back to Maxwell’s more detailed math. Feynman noted, “…ten thousand years from now - there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the nineteenth century will be judged as Maxwell’s discovery of the laws of electrodynamics.”
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Oct 23, 2017 Dan rated it it was amazing

I loved every page of this book. A superb tandem biography of Faraday and Maxwell (and Heaviside to a much smaller degree). It is refreshing to celebrate real heroes, even those who have been dead for 150 years. The last biographical science book that I read that was this good was Simon Singh's Big Bang which I also recommend although it has many superficial biographical vignettes.

This was a non-technical read, although if you don't like science it would be a slog. However there are only three ...more

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Jun 08, 2016 Lemar rated it it was amazing

Shelves: biography, non-fiction, science, 2010-s

I had thought that the leap forward to modern Physics was from Newton to Einstein. This book shines the spotlight on two true gentlemen of science, Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. They were the ones who freed Physics from a view of the natural world that compared it to a machine like a clock and brought forward the idea that it is the concept of fields of energy that underlie our physical reality.

The affection and awe that Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon feel for these two gian ...more

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May 09, 2017 Nyamka Ganni rated it it was amazing

Shelves: science, favorites, biography, want-to-own, non-fiction, charlie-munger-list

Superb! Mind-blowing!
It was fascinating to learn about how electricity come to become indispensable part of our lives and how it all started with Faraday and many great minds before him!
Absolutely amazing! I'm starting to love physics all over again! Btw, Faraday is my favorite scientist!

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Oct 02, 2016 Book rated it it was amazing

Shelves: science

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 interesti ...more

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Apr 15, 2014 G. Branden rated it really liked it

Forbes and Mahon have written a fabulous scientific biography, presenting us the life stories not only of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, but of the birth of electromagnetism as a field of serious study, unifying the phenomena of electricity and magnetism, thought separate for millennia.

In the final chapter they carry the story beyond Maxwell's death and link it satisfyingly with the development of quantum and special relativity theory.

This book left me wanting t ...more

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Jun 20, 2016 Luis Roberto Reyes Romero rated it it was amazing

Inspiring for those of us that, just as Faraday did, believe that true science is about experimentation and curiosity, not ONLY about complicated equations and mathematical proofs.

Also, I learn more on 3 hours about the fundamentals of electromagnetism than from 2 semesters in college.

Good read all around.

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May 16, 2017 Graeme Roberts rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: Charlene

What a superb book! I have never read an account of the history of science that gave me such deep pleasure. The writing is uniformly elegant and precise, and so lucid that even non-scientists can understand concepts and hypotheses that stumped all but a few physicists at the time. Many physics books, even those intended to make the science understandable to the layperson fail in that regard. You certainly don't need to love physics to enjoy it, but I think that you must be attuned to the great b What a superb book! I have never read an account of the history of science that gave me such deep pleasure. The writing is uniformly elegant and precise, and so lucid that even non-scientists can understand concepts and hypotheses that stumped all but a few physicists at the time. Many physics books, even those intended to make the science understandable to the layperson fail in that regard. You certainly don't need to love physics to enjoy it, but I think that you must be attuned to the great beauty of science.

Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell were very different in background and education, but they were both gentlemen of exemplary character. Maxwell, now considered the greatest scientific genius of the 19th century was both theoretician and experimentalist, able with hard work and consistent use of his unconscious mind to describe experimental results in mathematical terms. He transcended the concrete, mechanical assumptions of Newtonian physics, allowing his successors to further reveal the electromagnetic field. When asked if he had stood on the shoulders of Newton, Albert Einstein replied: "That is not quite right; I stood on Maxwell's shoulders." The book continues, "Maxwell himself would probably have said that it began in 1921 when Michael Faraday imagined a circular force around a current-carrying wire. Together, they gave future generations a model for the interplay of experiment and theory, where each illuminates a path for the other. Neither man was confined to the role commonly assigned to him by casual historians. Faraday, the renowned experimenter, put forward some of the most imaginative and daring theoretical ideas; and Maxwell, the cerebral theoretician, carried out some of the most demanding experiments."

All of the advances that have made modern life better for all human beings have depended in some way on our understanding and application of the electromagnetic field. It would have come eventually, but how apt that such kind, humble, and decent men delivered it. ...more

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Jan 17, 2017 Ryan Curry rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history-of-science, physics, biographies

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I can comfortably say this is one of the best History of Science / Science Biography books I have read. Forbes and Mahon give an engaging and concise history of the electromagnetic field. In the process giving us a detailed look in the the lives of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell.

Somewhere in this book it is quoted that physicists everywhere still look to Clerk Maxwell as an inspiration and a role model. I would be surprised if any physics minded person c ...more

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Oct 24, 2014 Brent Neal rated it it was amazing

Shelves: science

An engaging and involved biography of two of the most influential physicists of the modern age. One a seat-of-his-pants experimentalist, the other a careful mathematical prodigy, together they laid the foundation for all of modern physics. I especially appreciated that the book did not end with Maxwell's death, but rather continued the thread of how his ideas about electromagnetism were curated and expanded upon by others, leading ultimately to the Nobel-prizewinning work on the photoelectric ef ...more

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Sep 22, 2017 Howard Liu rated it it was amazing

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Aside from his obvious intelligence, what profoundly impressed me was Faraday's intellectual curiosity. Driven by an insatiable thirst for knowledge and discovery, Faraday, a blacksmith's son who grew up binding books in a bookshop, became the greatest scientist in his time. He retained his wonder for the natural world throughout his life, constantly questioning and experimenting and developing theories, most notably that of electromagnetic lines of forces which completely abolished the prevaili Aside from his obvious intelligence, what profoundly impressed me was Faraday's intellectual curiosity. Driven by an insatiable thirst for knowledge and discovery, Faraday, a blacksmith's son who grew up binding books in a bookshop, became the greatest scientist in his time. He retained his wonder for the natural world throughout his life, constantly questioning and experimenting and developing theories, most notably that of electromagnetic lines of forces which completely abolished the prevailing perception of science. While his experimental discoveries shook the world, his theories on how they worked were largely ignored in part due to his lack of mathematical background- he could not condense his abstract ideas into formulas that govern how things work.

Then came James Maxwell, a true genius of his time who dabbled and made great impacts in many fields. I was particularly intrigued by the way his mind applies knowledge. He was widely read, and had an astute ability to draw on analogies in order to understand things. According to Maxwell himself, "although pairs of things may differ widely from each other, the relation in the one pair may be the same as that in the other... the relation is the most important thing to know, a knowledge of one thing leads us a long way towards knowledge of the other". He also believed in the power of the subconscious mind, often laying a particular area of research dormant in his mind for a few months before coming back to explore it in an entirely different approach. In this way, he was able to make discoveries and provide explanations using highly unconventional methods, and eventually consolidated Faraday's electric and magnetic lines of forces into a unified electromagnetic field theory. An expert mathematician in his own right, he conjured formulas that could accurately describe this phenomenon, which is the divergence, curl and gradient of a field. In an interesting note though, his propensity for dispensing metaphors made him largely a confusing lecturer, and his unwillingness to simplify his highly complicated math (so that it could be further expanded for future discoveries) made his theories very inaccessible to other men of his time, and he died before they became the universal truth that it was now.

All in all, this book gave many inspiring insights about two scientific giants, especially the way they gain knowledge and apply it. A few important traits are curiosity, intellectual courage, and rigorous scrutinizing of their own work. Remarkably, even as busy as they were, both of them were great givers to the community, believing in education via the honing of an analytical and philosophical mind, and participating in various national projects to improve the infrastructure of the community. ...more

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Feb 24, 2017 Scott Kirkwood rated it liked it · review of another edition

I found the frequent historical quotes distracting. Sometimes the author repeated themselves. would have preferred a little more math.

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Aug 27, 2014 Filip Ligmajer rated it it was amazing

page 61 | location 930-934 | Added on Thursday, 17 July 2014 16:21:50

By Ampère's theory, the magnetic force was simply what you got when you added all the straight-line forces between pairs of current elements mathematically. Faraday saw things differently—to him, the magnetic force that curved around any current-carrying wire was not an indirect, mathematically derived effect of straight-line forces, it was something primal, a circular force in its own right. The idea of a circular ...more

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Oct 31, 2019 Vikrant rated it really liked it

3.5/5 stars - Most of us don't really remember what Faraday and Maxwell did; we have not much reason to. School textbooks somehow don't really capture the beauty of these geniuses.

Incidentally, the first physics "textbook" ever was written by Maxwell and apparently it was also quite boring and most of it was incomprehensible to most. So that's that. A bit of meta-weirdness.

But once you realise that Einstein considered Maxwell as the turning point in science, who in turn considered Faraday as t ...more

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Jan 22, 2018 Mike Davis rated it liked it

I wanted to learn more about Michael Faraday. For a long time, I've admired his outsider approach to scientific thought, and his overall modesty as a human. Since I am a chemist, I was familiar with his role in electrochemistry, but I was less familiar with his work in electricity and magnetism. His writing was detailed and very prosaic, and the authors of this biography followed suit. As a result, there are long passages describing the science that were difficult to follow, even for those with ...more

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Jun 14, 2017 Leanne rated it it was amazing

I picked up this book in preparation for visiting in a few weeks the James Clerk Maxwell museum in Edinburgh. I'm really looking forward to visiting the museum and taking a walking tour of all the sites in the city associated with the great James Clerk Maxwell. For As the reviewer says below, Newton credited his scientific success as, standing on the shoulders of giants. When Einstein was asked if he had stood on the shoulders of Newton, he said actually it was on Maxwell's shoulders. And Maxwel ...more

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Nov 24, 2018 Mike rated it it was amazing

This book will make you remember the wonderful Michael Faraday and the amazing James Clerk Maxwell! These were two extraordinary gentlemen, both seeking God's laws in nature by careful experimentations and brilliant minds, that will humble the reader.

As a young man, Faraday travelled to France along with his hero, Humphry Davy, who was to receive a science prize... DURING the Napoleonic wars!

There are many images and impressions that stand out, I would have to type a long ...more

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Nov 09, 2017 Mbogo J rated it really liked it

The strength of this book lies in how it put the faces to the ideas and personalized the story of the electromagnetic field. Apart from the main acts of Faraday and Maxwell, we got to know about other lesser known names like Dr. William Gilbert who was among the first people to carry a scientific inquiry into magnetism by building his own model earth to the brash responses of Olivier Heaviside who perfected Maxwell's equations and when accused of not using Quaternions he had a clever reply. He t ...more

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Mar 25, 2018 Vivek rated it liked it

Nancy Forbes book traces the history of the discovery of the rules of electromagnetism and the lives of the scientists, Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. I picked up this book because it was on a "best science books of the year" kind of list. The author manages to explain difficult concepts without the use of a single equation. In fact, even Maxwell's famous equations with the symbols for curl, divergence and gradient - mysterious even to someone familiar with mathematics - don't make it ...more

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Oct 21, 2018 Suneel Madhekar rated it liked it · review of another edition

As a student, I was intimidated by electromagnetic field theory. In the intervening years, nothing much has changed. So, I thought a popular book on the two legendary scientists who built the theory would be good to overcome the feeling of intimidation! Beyond doubt, Nancy Forbes provides a very readable, very humane picture of the lives and work of Michael Faraday and James Maxwell. The way the book is written not only does justice to the lives of the men, but also to the theory of the electrom ...more

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Sep 10, 2019 John rated it liked it

This book covers the life and ideas of Michael Farady and James Clerk Maxwell and the gradual discovery of the science behind electro-magnetism. The book does a good job—maybe too good—of covering their lives and the science that they discovered, Faradary through being a premier experimentalist and Maxwell being a premiere theorist (Maxwell built upon Faraday's discoveries).

It was an okay read that suffered from one glaring weakness: It is difficult to comprehend the facts of electro ...more

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Feb 08, 2019 Zack Endsley rated it liked it

Recommends it for: Engineering, Biography, History, Science

Shelves: biography, engineering, science, history

I found the information presented in this book about the lives of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell to be both compelling and entertaining. It is amazing to learn just how far ahead of their time these two gentlemen were in their thinking and research. They paved the way for major advancements in not only the world of electromagnetism, but chemistry, optics, physics, and the scientific community at large. In the final chapters the authors go on to explain how Oliver Heaviside, Lodge, Fitzg ...more

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Jul 29, 2018 Shawn Dvorak rated it really liked it

An interesting telling of the development of electromagnetic theory, the basis for much of modern physics, told from a human standpoint. Science in the mid-19th Century was primarily an observational undertaking, much more of an effort in collecting and cataloging instead of today's high-tech theoretical activities. Primarily an experimentalist, Michael Faraday was part of this "old school" tradition but formed an important bridge to the discovery of the underlying physical laws. His careful and ...more

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Mar 16, 2019 Saurabh rated it liked it

While well written and researched, this is too much biography and too little (popular) science. The problem with this of course is that very few scientists have led biographically interesting or important lives. For every Nash or Ramanujan, there are hundreds of Faradays and Maxwells. The interesting bit about the latter (to me at least) is far more the science they have produced than how they were when they produced it. In other words, I'd have preferred more text and explanation about the theo ...more

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Jan 17, 2017 Dan D'avella rated it it was amazing

Shelves: science, history

Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics was my first read of 2017, and it set a high bar for everything else I intend to read this year. I love biographies of scientists because when done well they bring together my two favorite non-fiction genres (history and popular science, if you didn't guess). I had high hopes for this one going in because of the subject matter and because of other reviews. I was not disappointed.

When we think of exemplars of Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics was my first read of 2017, and it set a high bar for everything else I intend to read this year. I love biographies of scientists because when done well they bring together my two favorite non-fiction genres (history and popular science, if you didn't guess). I had high hopes for this one going in because of the subject matter and because of other reviews. I was not disappointed.

When we think of exemplars of scientific genius, we generally think of icons like Newton or Einstein, who were responsible for major revolutions in our understanding of the universe. We also find ourselves captivated by figures like Richard Feynman who, in addition to his apparent genius, had a personality that made him larger-than-life. While their accomplishments may be impressive, other scientists like Faraday and Maxwell are often seen simply as the dots that connect the Newtons and Einsteins.

After reading this book, however, I am convinced that both Faraday and Maxwell were geniuses of the first order and that they made contributions to our understanding of the world that were at least as significant as those of Einstein and Newton. In fact, special relativity is in some sense a natural consequence of Maxwell's electromagnetic field theory (Einstein himself admitted that he stood on Maxwell's shoulders). Even more surprising is the fact that Faraday anticipated the idea that other forces including gravity might also be transmitted by "lines of force," which is exactly what general relativity predicts. In this respect, Faraday might be one of the first scientists to consider unified field theories (although he was ridiculed for these ideas in his own lifetime).

Although this book favors explanations of the scientific concepts over biographical details (which suited my tastes just fine), it is clear that in addition to being world-class scientists, both Faraday and Maxwell were generous and conscientious men who did their best to serve humankind with their gifts. Faraday spent time helping to improve lighthouses around Britain, which was a matter of life and death for sailors of the time. Maxwell helped to improve the effectiveness of oceanic telegraph cables which were responsible for an information revolution at least as significant as that in our own era. Both were teachers of some renown, and both penned books that were, and still are, considered definitive in the study of electromagnetism.

The authors work to dispel the commonly held notion that Faraday's contributions were primarily experimental while Maxwell's were exclusively theoretical. Maxwell was an extremely clever and accomplished experimental scientist who made great contributions to the study of human color vision. Faraday's theories of "lines of force" that must transmit electrical and magnetic forces through space and time were the seed that germinated in Maxwell's mind.

While this book did not provide as much general historical concept as some other scientific biographies, it did contain a rich cast of secondary characters, including figures such as Davy, Ampere, Heaviside, and Hertz, who made significant contributions to the understanding of electromagnetism in their own right (in fact, the introduction to the book contains a beautiful description of Hertz's experiment that confirmed the existence of electromagnetic waves). In addition, the epilogue discusses in some depth the implications of Faraday's and Maxwell's discoveries for twentieth century science, including the insights of Einstein and others.

The authors place some emphasis on scientific process. They seem sympathetic to the idea that the concept of electromagnetic fields represented a true paradigm shift from the Newtonian worldview. However, they also show that real science proceeds incrementally, with many small contributions from many different places. While Faraday's and Maxwell's contributions were greater than most, they weren't working in a vacuum. Which leads me to my next point: aether. It is easy to ridicule the concept of the aether with hindsight, but the authors make a strong case that it was a quite useful idea in the history of science and that Maxwell's theory would not have been possible without it. Even wrong ideas can be valuable tools.

One criticism I have is that some of the explanations of the Faraday's and Maxwell's theories about electromagnetism were fairly hazy. In Faraday's case this may be because his theories represent a fairly early stage in the understanding of electromagnetism. In Maxwell's case, it is because the explanations are completely non-mathematical (although there are references to fundamental concepts in vector calculus). As the authors point out, Maxwell's theories represent a first in mathematical physics in that the theory is entirely abstract: it is completely represented by the mathematical description itself, which does not lend itself to intuition. This paved the way for nearly all of twentieth century physics. In all, the authors did a fine job in presenting this content to a non-specialist reader.

In short, this was a fantastic read, and I would highly recommend it to all enthusiasts of science. It makes me wish I had studied physics or electrical engineering. ...more

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Jul 31, 2019 Jim D'Ambrosia rated it really liked it

This is the best non-technical treatment I've seen of electromagnetic theory and its history. It gives a general history of the subject and decent biographies of Faraday and Maxwell. Those two are immensely sympathetic figures, beyond being stone cold geniuses, that I can't help but feel inspired while following their lives. Highly recommended if you have an interest in the subject, and don't already know everything about it.

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Nov 10, 2019 David rated it it was amazing

Shelves: physics

The back-to-back lifetimes of these giants in physics gave us much of what we have today. All radio-wave (Electromagnetic waves) need Faraday and Maxwell. Here is another physics book that reads like and adventure novel. Very addicting! It is so cool to see the experiments described that define the beginning of our understanding of electricity and magnetism. These are not high-tech because they are so incredibly early and fundamental.

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Nov 08, 2017 Madhav Sinha rated it it was amazing

Shelves: ebook-owned

Shoulders of the Giants

This book is a tremendous work of beauty, passion & scholarship, written in very simple language accessible to every kind of science enthusiast. Incredible how the writing has brought to life the persona & the academics of the two greatest quintessential scientists. Fabulous work. Every student of science, even elementary school science, must read it to comprehend the spirit of science, which is so sadly missing mostly in today's world.

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Oct 31, 2018 Ed rated it it was amazing

If you, like me, have little background in physics, this book is a great place to begin. The dual biography helped me more than a biography of either. The authors were clear, without being condescending. The diagrams were very helpful. While I can't say that I fully understand all the science discussed, I do have a fuller appreciation of the revolutionary impact of the work of these two men.

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Dec 29, 2018 Michael A. Shaw rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Excellent tribute

We easily forget the broad, strong shoulders that we stand upon. This book made these amazing people come alive and explained their discoveries in a way that the layman can understand and appreciate.

In a very readable way she shows the development of physics from Newton to Faraday to Maxwell to Einstein.

Highly recommend.

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“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.” — 1 likes

“I have no reason to believe that the human intellect is able to weave a system of physics out of its own resources without experimental labor. Whenever the attempt had been made it has resulted in an unnatural and self-contradictory mass of rubbish.” — 1 likes

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Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics

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Trivia About Faraday, Maxwell,...

Quotes from Faraday, Maxwell,...

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Preview — Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field by Nancy Forbes

Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics

Get A Copy

Friend Reviews

Reader Q&A

Lists with This Book

Community Reviews

new topicDiscuss This Book

Readers also enjoyed

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About Nancy Forbes

Books by Nancy Forbes

Trivia About Faraday, Maxwell,...

Quotes from Faraday, Maxwell,...

new topic
Discuss This Book