"A consummately readable book in a difficult field.",
"the immediacy of a novel while preserving its 'hard science' content."
David Cahan (June 1993) American Historical Review: 98(3): 861–3 (Reviewed with Daniel Siegel (1991) Innovations in Maxwell's Electromagnetic Theory: Vortices, Displacement current, and Light)
"
Hertz results gave the Maxwellians, who until then were only a small fringe group of electrical theorists, the experimental basis they had previously lacked and helped them overcome the objections of the 'practical' telegraphers and place them at the center of British electrical science."
"FitzGerald advanced the much more daring idea that the interferometer contracts along the direction of motion by an amount that exactly compensates for the expected delay."
"The subject is made readable and given a human dimension by a very skillful interweaving of biographical information and by extensive and very apt quotations from contemporaneous material."
Daniel Siegel (1992) Physics Today "clear, cogent, and interesting, with a good balance between coverage of personalities and their interactions and that of technical issues."