André Koch Torres Assis's Project of Translating the Works of Wilhelm Eduard Weber Advances

Oct 05, 2024

As I described in my post English Translations of Coulomb, Ampère and Weber, for many years Prof. André Koch Torres Assis of the University of Campinas in Brazil has been working on making available to the world the works on electricity of Wilhelm Eduard Weber (1804-1891). This project continues, as Prof. Assis is preparing a fifth volume of Weber’s collected works. This post summarizes the current status of this monumental project.

Weber was the last of a continuous line of great physicists who worked explicitly with the principle of action-at-a-distance, also known as actio-in-distans or far-action. In the world of electricity, these included Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (1736-1806), André-Marie Ampère (1775-1836) and Franz Ernst Neumann (1798-1895).

Peter and Neal Graneau, in their book Newton versus Einstein: How Matter Interacts with Matter1, give a succinct summary of Weber’s work, which was encouraged by Gustav Fechner (1801-1887):

Professor Gustav Fechner argued, at the University of Leipzig, that the electric fluid in Ampere’s current element should consist of discrete charges. The individual charges should obey Coulomb’s far-action law. This would make it possible to express Ampere’s electrodynamic law for two current elements in terms of Coulomb’s electrostatic law for two charged particles. It would unify the sciences of electrostatics and electrodynamics. The urge to unify forces has been with us ever since.
Fechner instructed his assistant Wilhelm Weber (1804-1891) to undertake the task. Weber then assumed that the electricity in a copper wire was made up of positive and negative charges and a small piece of metal surrounding them. The challenge before him was to find a force law for the interaction of two of these current elements. The interaction had to agree with the predicted by Ampere’s law. To this he added the Coulomb forces acting between the two charge pairs. The final formula he called, rather ambitiously, “the universal fundamental law of electric action”.
Since Weber’s law remained faithful to Newtonian far-actions and agreed in other respects with Ampere’s law, it also had to lead to Neumann’s law of induction which was originally derived from Ampere’s law. The universal Weber formula turned out to be a combination of the laws of Coulomb, Ampere, and Neumann…. The new idea in Weber’s electrodynamics was that the magnetic effect of the electric current was due to the motion of electric charges. [pp.120-121]

For more discussion of this topic, have a look at my three posts:

Let us move on to Prof. Assis’s work.

New papers by Prof. Assis commenting on Weber’s work

The first paper, quite short, relates how today’s unit, the ampere, was originally called the weber. The other two papers give detailed presentations of the differences between Weber’s electrodynamics and the quite diverse field-based electrodynamic theories.

2024, A.K.T. Assis. The Weber as an Electrical Unit of Measure:

http://www.ifi.unicamp.br/~assis/The-Weber-as-an-electrical-unit-of-measure.pdf

2024, A.K.T. Assis. The Velocity in Weber’s Electrodynamics Versus the Velocities in Different Field Theories:

http://www.ifi.unicamp.br/~assis/Velocity-in-Weber-and-field-theories.pdf

2024, A.K.T. Assis. Weber’s Electrodynamics Versus Different Field Theories:

http://www.ifi.unicamp.br/~assis/Weber-versus-field-theories.pdf

New translations made available in October 2024

This set of translations is of works written by some of Weber’s colleagues.

1840, C.F. Gauss. Introduction of the paper on General Propositions Relating to Attractive and Repulsive Forces Acting in the Inverse Ratio of the Square of the Distance:

http://www.ifi.unicamp.br/~assis/Gauss-1840.pdf

1892-1894, W. Voigt, Eduard Riecke, Heinrich Weber, F. Merkel and O. Fischer. Prefaces to the Collected Works of Wilhelm Weber:

http://www.ifi.unicamp.br/~assis/Prefaces-Weber-Werke.pdf

1899, W. Voigt. Gauss-Weber Monument:

http://www.ifi.unicamp.br/~assis/1899-Voigt.pdf

Translations made available in February 2024

Some of these translations have been improved and updated since their initial release in February 2024. This set includes several works which were only published posthumously.