Tradução Comentada das Principais Obras de Coulomb sobre Eletricidade e Magnetismo

Description

This book contains complete and commented translations, from French to Portuguese, of the main works of Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (1736-1806). They include his French Academy prize-winning memoir of 1777 on the best manner of constructing magnetic needles, his torsion work of 1784 and his 7 major Memoirs on electricity and magnetism read at the Academy from 1785 to 1791. In his works he described his famous torsion balance and his proof plane device utilized for quantitative studies in physics. He arrived experimentally at the law of torsion of silk threads and metal wires, at the central force between electrified bodies varying as the inverse square of their distance (known in the textbooks as Coulomb's law), at the law of force between magnetic poles also varying as the inverse square of their separation, at the law of exponential decay with which an electrified body loses charge to the support and environment (charge leakage), at the distribution of electricity at the surface of charged conducting bodies of differing sizes and chapes in several configurations of electrostatic equilibrium, and in advanced methods of magnetization and production of artificial magnets. He also created a theory of magnetism based on molecular polarization.