Electromagnetic induction: physics, historical breakthroughs, epistemological issues and textbooks

TL;DR

This paper reviews the history, theoretical developments, and textbooks on electromagnetic induction, emphasizing the importance of Maxwell's general law over the flux rule and clarifying misconceptions about magnetic force lines.

Contribution

It clarifies the historical and theoretical evolution of electromagnetic induction, highlighting the importance of Maxwell's general law and correcting misconceptions about magnetic force lines.

Findings

Maxwell's general law has been largely forgotten in favor of the flux rule.

The flux rule often gives incorrect predictions and lacks physical meaning.

Rotating lines of magnetic force are incompatible with established electromagnetism and are experimentally falsified.

Abstract

The discovery of Electromagnetism by Oersted (1820) started an 'extraordinary decennium' ended by the discovery of electromagnetic induction by Faraday (1831). During this decennium, in several experiments, the electromagnetic induction was there, but it was not seen or recognized. Faraday built up a local theory of electromagnetic induction based on the idea that there is an induced current when there is an intersection between lines of magnetic force and a conductor in relative motion. In 1873, Maxwell, within a Lagrangian description of electric currents, wrote down a 'general law of electromagnetic induction' in which a fundamental role is played by the vector potential. A modern reformulation of Maxwell's general law is based on the definition of the induced emf as the line integral of the Lorentz force on a unit positive charge and the use of the equation that relates the electric field to the potentials. Maxwell's general law has been rapidly forgotten; instead, the "flux rule" has deeply taken root. The "flux rule" not always yields the correct prediction, it does not say where the induced emf is localized, it requires ad hoc choices of the integration paths. It is not a physical law but only a calculation tool. To understand why Maxwell's `general law' has been forgotten, also a sample of representative textbooks, distributed over about a century, has been analyzed. In this framework, a part of the paper deals with the idea of rotating lines of magnetic force, falsified by Faraday, but common in the first decades of the Twentieth century and astonishingly resumed recently. It is shown that this hypothesis is incompatible with Maxwell - Lorentz - Einstein electromagnetism and that it is falsified also by recent experiments. Finally, the electromagnetic induction in some recent research papers is briefly discussed.