A compass needle depiction of lines of force, showing who the magnetic field lines go out of the north end of the bar magnetic and curve back around and project into the south end of the magnet. |
The following are similar depictions using a permanent magnet, iron filings and compasses:![]()
In the 1830s, English chemical physicist Michael Faraday adopted Halley's circulating effluvia ideas into a "lines of force" theory. In 1852, Faraday published “On the physical character of the lines of magnetic force”, in which Faraday affirms the physical reality of lines of force, and their causal action, as distinct from a purely geometrical treatment of their distribution in space.
A “time wheel” view of a 2004 party in Hungary, following their joining of the European Union; one person’s depiction of how people move along “partial complexities of political, economic and social lines of force.” (Ѻ) |
“The object of education should be the teaching [of] how to react with vigor and economy. No doubt the world at large will always lag so far behind the active mind as to make a soft cushion of inertia to drop upon; but education should try to lessen the obstacles, diminish the friction, invigorate the energy, and should train minds to react, not at haphazard, but by choice, on the lines of force that attract their world.”German physiologist Wolfgang Kohler (1887-1967), student of Max Planck, who spent 1907-1909 at the University of Berlin focused on a link between physics and psychology, supposedly, in his early work with apes, employed some type of Faraday-based lines of force model of movement, which John Martin summarizes as follows: [6]— Henry Adams (1907), The Education of Henry Adams [1]
“In his early work with apes (1917), Kohler had described their movement in some cases using a metaphor of traversing one of the ‘lines of force’ that Faraday saw emerging from magnets. One example was the inability of an animal near a desired object to move away in order to take a successful indirect path around an intervening obstacle, this inability increased the closer the animal came to the object, such that an animal beginning on an insightful, indirect path might be drawn helplessly to the object if it came too near it and would end up abandoning the successful initial plan. In such cases, the action of the animal would be better explained by proposing that the object had a gravity0like pull than by attempting to explain the animal responding to differential stimuli from the environment.”
“We will soon have the occasion to discuss the social philosophies of some really great physicists when they deign to pass judgment on social questions. Here we are concerned with an attempt to engraft ‘relativist’ history through the medium of relativist phraseology. The frame of reference, lines of force in a gravitational field, the time-space continuum, all these are noble conceptions in physics where they are endowed with precise meaning and have been subjected to experimental proof. Writers have attempted to smuggle these conceptions into history by the simple expedient of employing the same idioms. They sound the same, but have not the same meaning. Let them use facts instead of phrases, proof instead of analogies.”— Morris Zucker (1945), A Field Theory of History [2]
“[Zucker’s] positive interest is the new physics of Einstein and his twentieth-century associates. He believes that history like matter is made up of fields of force which have definite and predictable relationships, and of lines of force which can be traced in the past and projected into the future so that the historian may prophesy.”— Roy Nichols (1945), “Book Review: The Philosophy of History” [3]