In physics, the field concept describes the distribution and propagation of effects such as magnetism and gravity through space. Field theories have helped implement the program of unifying the "forces" of nature.
The discovery of a connection between electricity and magnetism is usually attributed to Hans Christian Ørsted (1777–1851), who in the winter of 1819 found that a wire carrying a current deflects a magnet. Subsequent experiments determined the dependence of the effect on the relative distance and orientation between the wire and the magnet. Ørsted had pursued his investigations be…
In 1905, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) disposed of the concept of the mechanical ether. Electromagnetic fields propagated in vacuo with the speed of light in all inertial frames. His special theory of relativity showed that the electric and magnetic fields could be represented by one (tensor) field, such that the effects that appear in a reference system as arising from a magnetic field appea…
In 1967 and 1968, the American nuclear physicist Steven Weinberg and the Pakistani nuclear physicist Abdus Salam independently proposed a gauge theory of the weak interactions that unified the electromagnetic and the weak interactions using the Higgs mechanism. Their model incorporated suggestions advanced by the American theoretical physicist Sheldon Glashow in 1961 on how to formulate a gauge t…
Buchwald, Jed Z. From Maxwell to Microphysics: Aspects of Electromagnetic Theory in the Last Quarter of the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Cao, T. Yu. Conceptual Developments of Twentieth Century Field Theories. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Davies, Paul. ed. The New Physics. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Dirac, P. A. M. &#…
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