Book cover of The Maxwellians

Book description

James Clerk Maxwell published the Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in 1873. At his death, six years later, his theory of the electromagnetic field was neither well understood nor widely accepted. By the mid-1890s, however, it was regarded as one of the most fundamental and fruitful of all physical theories.…

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1 author picked The Maxwellians as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

In telling us how four men with disparate but complementary talents came together to bring James Clerk Maxwell’s epoch-changing but hitherto obscure theory of electromagnetism to the world, Bruce Hunt somehow succeeds in combining the highest level of scholarship with a warm and engaging narrative. One gets to know Oliver Heaviside, Oliver Lodge, George Francis FitzGerald, and Heinrich Hertz, and to feel almost as though one were sharing their struggles and triumphs. I love this book.

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