Beschreibung:
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The number of scientists actively extending the frontiers of knowledge has always been small compared to the number engaged in what Kuhn called ‘normal science’. Many of Faraday’s contemporaries shared his interest in the relationship between electric, magnetic, and other forces. A few, such as Joule and Pliicker, were quick to take up the results reported in his
<jats:italic>Experimental Researches in Electricity</jats:italic>
. When we turn to the theoretical interpretation of these results, however, the picture is different. Until 1845 Faraday was virtually alone in developing the lines of force approach for which he became famous. In 1845 he was joined by W illiam Thomson, who had learned of Faraday’s ‘conception of electric and magnetic forces acting along curved lines’ at Glasgow, four years earlier. Of their correspondence nearly three dozen letters remain from the period 1845 to 1860. One third were written between August 1845 and July 1849, the years in which Faraday’s experimental findings and Thomson’s mathematical expertise combined to produce the first rigorous field theory of magnetism.
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