Oliver Heaviside: The Life, Work, and Times of an Electrical Genius of the Victorian Age

Oliver Heaviside is practically unknown today, unless you still call the ionosphere the Heaviside Layer, but far less worthy scientists have been awarded Nobel prizes. He has found an excellent biographer in Paul Nahin, who is completely at home with his material. It's a delight to see footnotes and technical notes that seriously enhance the value of the book. Thoroughly recommended to anyone with an interest in a man who helped to establish our electrical & electronic age.

This book has a nice mix of scientific history and mathematical information. It's not just pages of equations, but they are there to help explain the concepts. Also the tech notes are great for those of us who like to see how it all works out. I would recommend this book to engineers, scientists, mathematicians, or just people who enjoy a little history of science and technology. Heaviside is quite an interesting person.

Definitively professor Paul J. Nahin must be not just a great mind, but a great soul and great educator too. I just want to thank him for sharing with us this magnificent work.

This review of his book is written too, not for those "seeking a way to kill time", neither for those who faint at the sight of square root, and let alone of the square root of minus one.

The most impressive and amazing thing about the work of J.C.M and O. H. is that they the both developed the Electromagnetic theory in a time when the electron concept did not exist, or else, within a wrong framework.

They both

"strived, in fact, to achieve a physical theory without making assumptions about the underying details of the physics",

something that is seen quite often, these days, in some modern theoretical physicists, the so-called mainstream physics.

This work of professor Nahin is so full of hints why the electromagnetic theory "have resisted the errosion and corrosion of progress", and the first and most obvious one is that behind that theory lies the basis of physical reality, or as Einstein said once, understanding the electron is enough.

In fact my guess is that the electron is our first form of "measurable" energy which

"is one the great continuing(and, to my mind mysterious)issues"

of the physical reality, that Faraday resumed, thinking most probably in the magnetic field, and as so in a general and "easy" to grasp concept, I mean, the field, as anyone can "see" its lines of force in the space around, a reason why Thomson realized

"that a Faraday field could in some way store energy"

recognizing this fact as its greatest idea, but its was Maxwell who

"made the idea of distributed energy in space the central concept of electrodynamics"

However when dealing with the field concept there we have a departure of ideas between Maxwell and Heaviside, as it were, between the "pure physicist" and the engineer dealing and thinking in the physical reality.

The question is:

is not modern thought making a great mistake when

"turning away from the view of Hertz and Heaviside that the fields are the real thing"?

Maxwell was most impressed with its mathematical-theoretical beautiful concept the

"Electrokinetic Momentum... that...it may even be called the fundamental quantity of electrodynamics",

a point of view shared today, in some way, by the nobel prize Richard Feynman who wrote:

"In the theory of quantum electrodynamics, one takes the vector and scalar potential as the fundamental quantities. E and B are slowly disappearing from the modern expression of physical laws".

Well, for not extending this review anymore, I wonder if in some way, behind this departure is not the reason why the Father of Quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrodinger wrote in his Interpretation of Quantum mechanics, July 1952 Colloquium:

"I am opposing not a few special statements of quantum mechanics held today, I opposing as it were the whole of it, I am opposing its basics views that have been shaped 25 years ago...

...here no trace is left of anything that might be thought of as representing the path of a particle. Hence the idea of point electrons-whatever it may mean elsewhere- becomes absolutely inadequate in this region, that is to say within the "body" of an atom. To my mind it is patently absurd to call anything the probability of finding an electron near a particular point in this region..."

There we have a departure between the particle point of view still prevailing in modern physics when dealing with the electron, and considering it, the electron, a source of a more fundamental real field, I mean, the magnetic field B in which energy is stored, being it the real thing we can grasp and measure, when dealing with the mysterious energy concept.

An excellent book which gives a deep insight into the life and work of this unknown genious.

Students who are really interested in physics, electrical engineering or related subjects would find this book informative and inspiring.
Real electrical engineer would have the deepest feeling when reading through the lines.
Written for a genius (hero) by a great educator of the field.