Junior Lab

In this guidebook to Faraday's Experimental Researches in Electricity, Howard Fisher guides the reader through Faraday's work, displaying Faraday's experimental virtuosity and keen theoretical insight. Fisher has a wonderful way of seeing the philosophical and literary aspects that make Faraday's Researches not cold science but a human work. Fisher's thoughtful selections and clear, helpful explanations of the instrumentation and electromagnetic phenomena make this fascinating text accessible to those who lack time to find their way through the labyrinths of the original.

This slender book opens a path through Maxwell's massive Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism that attains two important objectives: first, in Maxwell's own words and mathematics, it presents an overview of the revolutionary field theory of electricity and magnetism, from the most basic phenomena to the complete theory; and second, it shows, using additional original papers by Maxwell, how the four Maxwellian equations familiar to later physicists emerge from the more discursive general theory. The final part of the path, leading from the Treatise to the equations, passes, surprisingly and delightfully, through Maxwell's presentation of the wave theory of light as a direct consequence of electromagnetic field theory. Maxwell's numerous clear physical examples and illustrations, and Howard Fisher's lucid explanatory notes, allow even those without a knowledge of calculus to understand the general features of electromagnetic theory, as Maxwell himself developed it.