Contents
The book has four chapters: The Rise of The Mechanical View, The Decline of the Mechanical View, Field, Relativity, and Quanta.
The third chapter (Field, Relativity) examines lines of force starting with gravitational fields (i.e., a physical collection of forces), moving on to descriptions of electric and magnetic fields. The authors explain that they are attempting to "translate familiar facts from the language of fluids...into the new language of fields." They state that the Faraday, Maxwell, and Hertz experiments led to modern physics. They describe how "The change of an electric field produced by the motion of a charge is always accompanied by a magnetic field."
The two pillars of the field theory (pp.142-148)
The reality of the field (pp.148-156)
Field and ether (pp.156-160)
The mechanical scaffold (pp.160-171)
Ether and motion (pp.172-186)
Time, distance, relativity (pp.186-202)
Relativity and mechanics (pp.202-209)
The time-space continuum (pp.209-220)
General relativity (pp.220-226).
Read more about this topic: The Evolution Of Physics
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