Nancy Forbes - Faraday, Maxwell, and the electromagnetic field: how two men revolutionized physics

PHOTO BY DIANA ADAMS

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 for IEEEs Computing in Science & Engineering. Currently, she works for the US Department of Defense.

PHOTO BY EMILY MAHON

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 he worked for the British Government Statistical Service.

The seeds for this book were sown over thirty years ago when one of us was a graduate student in physics and heard a lecture by Nobel laureate C. N. Yang about the role of symmetry in twentieth-century physics. Yang spoke of the birth of a pristine and heretofore unheard-of concept born from the simple instruments found in Michael Faradays laboratory in the Royal Institution: field theory. It was the rise of this idea that gave way to most of the major developments in modern physics and became the basis for todays reigning theory of matter and forces, the Standard Model. Yet Faradays work, by itself, could not have had the monumental effect on physics it had without the subsequent efforts by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell to put Faradays idea into mathematical language, which resulted in a full-fledged theory of the electromagnetic field. Yang, who made his own fundamental contributions to field theory, truly understood how radical and how profound this new concept was.

It was a story that was begging to be told. Many people lent a hand in getting this book written. Correspondence with Faraday scholars Frank James and Ryan Tweney helped to clarify aspects of Faradays work. Talks with Maxwell biographer Francis Everitt also added to the narrative. Discussions with friends such as Tony Fainberg, Phil Schewe, Allan Blaer, Will Happer, Freeman Dyson, Mal Ruderman, Barbara and Jeffrey Mandula, Louise Marlowe, Robert and Linda Avila, and Simki Kuznick helped to fine-tune the story and make the physics more accessible. Thanks to Lee Bartrop for his carefully drawn diagrams throughout the text, as well as to John Bilsland for the diagrams of Maxwells spinning cells model. Thanks also to Tom Haggarty at the Bridgeman Art Library for making available many of the images found in the photo insert. Trinity College Library at Cambridge University also gave us permission to reproduce several Maxwell images. Our editor at Prometheus Books, Steven L. Mitchell, recognized the importance of our story early on and has handled our queries with patience and graciousness.

We are grateful for permission from the publishers of two of Basil Mahons earlier books to include short extracts: to John Wiley and Sons for the diagram and accompanying text describing Maxwells spinning cells model in The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell (2003), and to the Institution of Engineering and Technology for the descriptions of the electromagnetic power vector and the curl and divergence operators in Oliver Heaviside: Maverick Mastermind of Electricity (2009).

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