[this web page last updated 29 January 2007]
Experimental Researches in Electricity
in three deluxe volumes
Facsimile reprint
A handsomely-bound facsimile reprint of the three-volume first edition
of Faraday's great work on electricity and magnetism
The Experimental Researches in Electricity is a series of
articles, originally published in scientific journals, presenting Faraday's
work on electricity and magnetism over almost a quarter of a century.
In it, Faraday argues masterfully for a radically experimental approach
to nature, in the course of which he evolves many of the concepts and
terms that have come to be fundamental to our understanding of electricity.
Faraday's elegant prose style and his avoidance of mathematics and technical
jargon make the work remarkable accessible to all readers, scientists
and nonscientists alike.
This wonderful work, which had been out of print for some time, challenges
the dominant Newtonian mathematical paradigm that was then being applied
to electrical phenomena by Ampère and other physicists. Faraday
proposes an alternative vision, in which carefully designed and skillfully
executed experiments allow natural laws to be revealed directly and unambiguously,
with a minimum of theoretical presuppositions.
Complete and unabridged; total of 1536 pages plus oversized plates in
pockets affixed to inside back covers. .
The first edition text was ainstakingly photographed and each page individually
cleaned up, This is not a typical reprint! .Smyth sewn binding, covered
with deluxe Rainbow 9 binding material, Highest quality heavy acid free
paper.
Set of three volumes, $175.
ISBN 1888009-15-2
Publication date 2000.
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Comments on Faraday's work:
"If by anything I have here written [in the Treatise on Electricity
and Magnetism] I may assist any student in understanding Faraday's
modes of thought and expression, I shall regard it as the accomplishment
of one of my principal aims---to communicate to thers the same delight
which I have found myself in reading Faraday's Researches."
---James Clerk Maxwell, Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism
"What then is Faraday's concept of science? It is evident that he is
not merely an experimentalist, cleverly providing data for theoreticians
to work up into theories. On the contrary, Faraday had one of the most
fertile and insistent of speculative minds; in a certain sense, he was
constantly producing new hypotheses and his mind was constantly reasoning
from them. The result of this, reported in the thousands of paragraphs
of the Experimental Researches and the still more numerous paragraphs
of the Diary, is not theory, but a vast weaving and unweaving of
powers, a process of discovery and identification, a great, highly unified
formulary for the production and classification of effects. Faraday, as
Tyndall proclaimed and all the world agreed, is the great "discoverer";
the paradigm for Faraday is Odysseus rather than Euclid: he travels from
land to land, reporting wonders, guided by legend and myth, rumor or divine
love. For Odysseus, the dominant desire is to see men's cities and to know
their minds, and to gather all this together in the return to Ithaca. For
Faraday, it is to investigate all the powers of nature, and to unveil them
as essentially one, in the lecture hall on Albermarle Street. If Faraday
did not learn this from Homer, he was moved to it by Dr. Watts:
Let the hope of new discoveries, as well as the satisfaction and pleasure
of known truths, animate your daily industry. Do not think learning in
general is arrived at its perfection, or that the knowledge of any particular
subject in any science cannot be improved, merely because it has lain five
hundred or a thousand years without improvement. The present age, by the
blessing of God on the ingenuity and diligence of men, has brought to light
such truths in natural philosophy, and such discoveries in the heavens
and the earth, as seemed to be beyond the reach of man. . . .
---Thomas K. Simpson, Figures of Thought (forthcoming
from Green Lion Press)
"In Faraday's laboratory, experiments do not generally issue in "laws." In
his writing, moreover, descriptions of things are always in English prose, never
in that pure syntax of symbols which is algebra. If I remember rightly there
isnot a single equation to be found anywhere in the Experimental Researches,
or even (it has been said) a statement of the kind that one would want to
put into the form of an equation! Instead there are accounts---really, histories---of
the actions of electric and magnetic powers. These are not forensically arranged
so as to eliminate this hypothesis while confirming that one, nor are they linked
as the confirmations of predictions which were deduced from stated premises.
But they are episodically linked, one theme or subject continually evolving,
suggesting another, reappearing in a new form or with new associations, until
at last we begin to feel that the story told gives a likely account of what
the actors and agencies did; but, more important, it reveals who and what they
are.
"Someone might say, patronizingly, "A physics book
without equations, without proofs or theorems---why, anyone can
read it!" If it is true that anyone can read Faraday, that is of course
a good thing. And if true, it is not because the absence of algebra makes
Faraday's book an easy book. It is at least as difficult to read theExperimental
Researches as it is to read Don Quixote. Or, for another comparison,
Thomas Simpson once said that Faraday wrote like no one so much as like
Aeschylus. That remark was, for me, the single most helpful guide to the
study of Faraday's writings."
Howard J. Fisher, "The Great Electrical Philosopher",
in The College, July 1979
Cloth cover, three volumes. List price $175. Sold only as a set. ISBN: 1-888009-15-2
10% discount for online orders.
For domestic orders we add a flat shipping charge of $7 regardless of
the number of items. For international shipping we add a flat shipping charge
of $14. International shipments of this set of books go by surface mail.
Click here to go to Green Lion Press
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