Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book tells how a series of very remarkable men tried to get a better understanding of the world. These men are Michael Faraday and those he influenced: William Thomson, James Clerk Maxwell, Herman von Helmholtz, Oliver Heaviside, Heinrich Hertz, Hendrik A. Lorentz and Albert Einstein. Michael Faraday held the metaphysical view that force is the sole physical substance. His theory is a new form of the older ideas of field theory of Descartes and Leibniz, and it led him to develop a field theory of electromagnetism. Field theory found its great triumph in the discovery of electromagnetic waves by Hertz, toward the end of the nineteenth century. Relativity is a kind of field theory, and so when evidence seemed to indicate that Einstein's relativistic theory of gravitation was better than Newton's, it was a victory for field theory.