Electrodynamics from Ampère to Einstein Review

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(More customer reviews)The modern physicist learns about electromagnetism as a done deal; a very polished product centred about Maxwell's equations. But this book shows the long forgotten tribulations and controversies that got us to today's known state.
This text is rather specialised. You need to be thoroughly conversant with electromagnetism. On a par with Jackson's text, "Classical Electrodynamics". But presumably you also have an interest in the history of your field. Darrigol shows that the path was often obscure. Only in full hindsight, after Maxwell and also Einstein made their contributions, did it all come clear.
The scarcity of vector notation in the 19th century accounts can make reading some of the equations a little awkward. You have to perform some slight mental contortions to reinterpret what they're saying, in modern notation.

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Three quarters of a century elapsed between Ampère's definition of electrodynamics and Einstein's reform of the concepts of space and time. The two events occurred in utterly different worlds: the French Academy of Sciences of the 1820s seems very remote from the Bern patent office of the early 1900s, and the forces between two electric currents quite foreign to the optical synchronization of clocks. Yet Ampère's electrodynamics and Einstein's relativity are firmly connected through an historical chain involving German extensions of Ampère's work, competition with British field conceptions, Dutch synthesis, and fin de siècle criticism of the aether-matter connection. Darrigol's book retraces this intriguing evolution, with a physicist's attention to conceptual and instrumental developments, and with an historian's awareness of their cultural and material embeddings. This book exploits a wide range of sources, and incorporates the many important insights of other scholars. Thorough accounts are given of crucial episodes such as Faraday's redefinition of charge and current, the genesis of Maxwell's field equations, or Hertz' experiments on fast electric oscillations. Thus emerges a vivid picture of the intellectual and instrumental variety of nineteenth century physics. The most influential investigators worked at the crossroads between different disciplines and traditions: they did not separate theory from experiment, they frequently drew on competing traditions, and their scientific interests extended beyond physics into chemistry, mathematics, physiology, and other areas. By bringing out these important features, this book offers a tightly connected and yet sharply contrasted view of early electrodynamics.

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