Physics in the Nineteenth Century

Description

cited in Jungnickel and McCormmach's Second Physicist (2017), p. 2fn2, as a "fine history of physics" and "An ample defense of the evolutionary approach to history of science, currently somewhat out of step with academic fashion"

Putting physics into the historical context of the Industrial Revolution and the European nation-state, Purrington traces the main figures, including Faraday, Maxwell, Kelvin, and Helmholtz, as well as their interactions, experiments, discoveries, and debates. The success of nineteenth-century physics laid the foundation for quantum theory and relativity in the twentieth. Robert D. Purrington is a professor of physics at Tulane University and coauthor of Frame of the Universe.