André Assis on The Experimental and Historical Foundations of Electricity
In my post English Translations of Coulomb, Ampère and Weber, and the subsequent post André Koch Torres Assis Publishes the Fifth Volume of Wilhelm Eduard Weber's Works, I wrote about the work that André Assis undertook to organize commented translations into English from the French of the works of Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (1736-1806) and André-Marie Ampère (1775-1836) and from the German of those of Wilhelm Eduard Weber (1804-1891). These three researchers all studied electricity from a Newtonian perspective, and there was never any reference in their work to any notion of electrical field or magnetic field.
André Assis has also written about the history of the study of electricity during the 18th century, before Coulomb, and published two small volumes under the title The Experimental And Historical Foundations of Electricity. Therein, he presents a number of simple experiments, many of which can be conducted at home with very simple materials, which emulate the experiments undertaken by the earliest researchers of electricity.
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Experimental-Historical-Foundations-Electricity/dp/1987980107
PDF: https://www.ifi.unicamp.br/~assis/Electricity-Vol-2.pdf
It turns out that the actual physical processes that take place, even when we undertake these simple experiments, are still not fully understood. Why, for example, when the surface of a conductor is covered with charges of the same polarity, do the charges remain on the surface despite their mutual repulsion?
Recently, André Assis has presented the ideas in these books in two interviews available on YouTube. I encourage my readers to watch the videos, and to follow the discussions therein.
First, with DemystifySci:
Second, with the Rising Tide Foundation:
In future posts, I intend to present some of the ideas in these two books, which are also available in Portuguese, Russian and Italian (second volume in progress).
In the meantime, I myself am contributing to the translation project, with translations of the first volume into French and Spanish.
When these translations are completely ready, we will be looking for publishers. And, of course, the books will, as with the originals, also be made available online.
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