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Theories That Outlive Their Reasons: Maxwell, and What Unification Actually Means
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 28 2026
Pages: 484
Weight: 1.41
Height: 0.97 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Following him from a schoolboy's pins and string to the first color photograph, from the rings of Saturn to the demon who lost his argument two generations after his death, this book traces how one Scottish physicist noticed that a number measured in a laboratory was also the speed of light, and how the field concept he built on that coincidence became the standard shape of every physical law that followed. It also asks a harder question. Physicists have spent fifty years trying to fold the four fundamental interactions into a single expression, and the effort has produced one genuine triumph and one very long silence. The final chapters argue that unity is a property of our descriptions rather than a discovered fact about the world, and that the four interactions deserve to be judged by what they actually do.
Written without a single equation, for readers who would rather understand a way of thinking than memorize a result.
Keywords: physics, electromagnetism, history of science, philosophy of science, scientific discovery, unification, Victorian science
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