General introduction

We are surrounded by devices that depend on the physics of electromagnetism, which is the combination of electric and magnetic phenomena. This physics is at the root of computers, television, radio, telecommunications, household lighting. This physics is also the basis of the natural world, it holds together all the atoms and molecules in the world.

   The new science of electromagnetism was developed further by workers in many countries. One of the best was Michael Faraday, a truly gifted experimenter with a talent for physical intuition and visualization. That talent is attested to by the fact that his collected laboratory notebooks do not contain a single equation. In the mid-nineteenth century, James Clerk Maxwell put Faraday’s ideas into mathematical form, introduced many new ideas of his own, and put electromagnetism on a sound theoretical basis.