| The Maxwellians | |
| Author: | Bruce J. Hunt |
| Language: | English |
| Genre: | History of science |
| Published: | 1991 |
| Publisher: | Cornell University Press |
| Isbn: | 9780801482342 |
| Isbn Note: | 1994 edition |
| Pages: | 280 |
The Maxwellians is a book by Bruce J. Hunt, published in 1991 by Cornell University Press; a paperback edition appeared in 1994, and the book was reissued in 2005. It chronicles the development of electromagnetic theory in the years after the publication of A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism by James Clerk Maxwell. The book draws heavily on the correspondence and notebooks as well as the published writings of George Francis FitzGerald, Oliver Lodge, Oliver Heaviside, Heinrich Hertz, and Joseph Larmor.
The book has nine chapters; their titles and section headings are:
"A consummately readable book in a difficult field.",
"the immediacy of a novel while preserving its 'hard science' content."
"Hertz results gave the Maxwellians, who until then were only a small fringe group of electrical theorists, the experimental basis they had previously lacked and helped them overcome the objections of the 'practical' telegraphers and place them at the center of British electrical science."
"An example of one of the best ways to write history of physics."
"FitzGerald advanced the much more daring idea that the interferometer contracts along the direction of motion by an amount that exactly compensates for the expected delay."
"If FitzGerald was the soul and cement of the group, Heaviside was its idiosyncratic genius."
Harman takes note of Jed Buchwald's book on Maxwellians of the Cambridge school and the slight overlap of that book with this one.
"The subject is made readable and given a human dimension by a very skillful interweaving of biographical information and by extensive and very apt quotations from contemporaneous material."