Pursuing Power and Light: Technology and Physics from James Watt to Albert Einstein

Pursuing Power and Light is a history of physics in the 19th century. The book focuses on the birth and development of two of the great branches of physics, thermodynamics and electromagnetism. In the second-to-last chapter, there is a brief discussion of the beginnings of atomic and nuclear physics that occurred in the last decade of that century with the discovery of radioactivity and the electron. The book concludes with a brief mention of Einstein’s theory of special relativity and its origins in electromagnetism. The unique aspect of this history of 19th century physics is that it is not viewed as an interaction merely between theory and experiment, but an interaction between theory, experiment, and technology. In particular, the invention of steam engines that powered transportation systems and the telegraph technology that sent communication signals on wires around the world played an absolutely critical role in the birth and development...