Among non-fiction , I love memoirs and autobiographies the most. Memoirs and autobiographies of great men are a widow to the times of their lives, their thought process and habits that made them successful.
Good memoirs come with great research on the subject matter that is related to the personality. For eg: I learnt many things about Relativity from his autobiography than many technical books.. I learnt many things about personal computers and the business of iPod and iPhone's from Steve Jobs biography by Walter Issacson.
So when I chose this book, my motivation was to understand the thought process and circumstances that helped these scientists make some fundamental discoveries in physics that revolutionized physics .
The book starts with the life of Micheal Faraday. Faraday did not have a formal education in math , but he made up for his lack of expertise by with practical experiments that helped him confirm his theories. His ideas weren't expressed formally and was not understood well by many physicists during his time. That gap was filled by James Clark Maxwell. Maxwell took special interest in the notes from Faraday and formalized them mathematically to create the Maxwell equations!
Here are some quotes I liked in the book:
"In August 1931, Faraday wrote in his laboratory journal, the first words for a new project that was to become his finest work. His 'Experimental Researches in Electricity', a monumental
opus, written in words without a single formula had begun" - pg 68
( The first electric motor )
".. he stuck an iron bar magnet into hot wax in the bottom of a basin and when the wax had hardened , filled the basin with mercury until only the top of the magnet was exposed . He dangled a short length of wire from an insulated string so that its bottom end dipped in the mercury, and then he connected the
terminal of a battery to the top end of the wire and the other to the mercury.
The wire and the mercury now formed part of a circuit that would remain unbroken even if the bottom end of the wire moved. And move it did !! in rapid circles around the magnet.
Not done yet, he modified the apparatus slightly, freeing the magnet and letting it float in the mercury , but with one end tethered to a fixed point in the base of the basin.
About a quarter of the magnet was now exposed above the surface of mercury. He replaced the dangling wire with a fixed one that dipped into the mercury at the center of its surface,
and then he reconnected the battery. This time the magnet revolved around the wire ! Faraday had become a discoverer : he had made the worlds first electric motor " - pg 59
(the first dynamo)
Using magnets to product electricity . Pg - 72-74.
Another great passage . Must read.
" Remarkably , all the common terms now used in electrolysis , except for the stubborn old survivor current ,are the ones Faraday created in the 1830's with the help of leaned friends". - pg 86
"... Lord Kelvin was prodigy who had enrolled at Glasgow university at the age of ten and taken prizes in all subjects... at the age of seventeen, he had shown that Faraday's electric lines of force could be represented by the same equations that Joseph Fourier had derived for the flow of heat in a metal bar - "pg 96
"internal strains in a transparent substance could be detected by shining polarized light through it."
(reason why many experiments were done with polarized light) - pg 97
"Over the years, it has included among its ranks, many who went on to make outstanding contributions to human thought and its expression. For e.g. AL Tennyson, Rupert Brook, Bertand Russel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, mathematician G.H.Hardy, E.M. Foster and John Maynard Kaynes" -pg 145.
(Describing about an elite discussion group called Apostles at Trinity college).
"Farady had though of the lines as discrete, he always talked of the number of lines, but Maxwell merged them into a continuous entity called flux". - pg 159
(Some history about 'flux' which is a common term in EM theory. )
"I know the tendency of the human mind is to do anything rather than think. But mental labor is not thought , and those who have with labor acquired the habit of application often find it much easier to get up a formula rather than master a principle" - pg 181.
** Highly recommend pages 187 - 188, where Maxwell derives Faraday's laws of electricity from 'first principles'. **
Verdict : Highly recommend this book for anyone who is interested in Physics. I liked the writing. The concepts and the discoveries of these scientists are explained clearly that even a lay person could understand.
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