front cover of The Creation of Scientific Effects
The Creation of Scientific Effects
Heinrich Hertz and Electric Waves
Jed Z. Buchwald
University of Chicago Press, 1994
This book is an attempt to reconstitute the tacit knowledge—the shared, unwritten assumptions, values, and understandings—that shapes the work of science. Jed Z. Buchwald uses as his focus the social and intellectual world of nineteenth-century German physics.

Drawing on the lab notes, published papers, and unpublished manuscripts of Heinrich Hertz, Buchwald recreates Hertz's 1887 invention of a device that produced electromagnetic waves in wires. The invention itself was serendipitous and the device was quickly transformed, but Hertz's early experiments led to major innovations in electrodynamics. Buchwald explores the difficulty Hertz had in reconciling the theories of other physicists, including Hermann von Helmholtz and James Clerk Maxwell, and he considers the complex and often problematic connections between theory and experiment.

In this first detailed scientific biography of Hertz and his scientific community, Buchwald demonstrates that tacit knowledge can be recovered so that we can begin to identify the unspoken rules that govern scientific practice.
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logo for The Institution of Engineering and Technology
Spectral Theory and Excitation of Open Structures
Victor P. Shestopalov
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 1996
Open resonators, open waveguides and open diffraction gratings are used extensively in modern millimetre and submillimetre technology, spectroscopy and radio engineering. The physical principles of open electrodynamic structures are different from those of closed ones because of radiation loss, edges, multiconnected cross-sections and the need to take into account the behaviour of electromagnetic fields at infinity. The eigenoscillation and eigenwave spectra become complex, there are additional demands on the energy relations and the statements of spectral problems change.
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