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Summary: 352 Book Reviews
force of gravity acting at a distance, which allows him to illustrate the instrumentalism/
realism issue. As a culmination of the development of the Newtonian worldview right
before its collapse, the author mentions the physics of electromagnetic fields developed
by Faraday and Maxwell. But this is a sort of physics that these scientists explicitly
opposed to the Newtonian models based on action at a distance between particles.
JORDI CAT
Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Indiana University
Representing Electrons: A Biographical Approach to Theoretical Entities
THEODORE ARABATZIS
Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006
xiv + 295 pp., ISBN 0226024202, US$70.00 (hardback); ISBN 0226024210, US$28.00
(paperback)
Theodore Arabatzis's book, Representing Electrons, is a fine piece of work in the history
and philosophy of science. The bulk of the book is a history of representations of the
electron, from 1891, when the term was introduced, to 1925, when Goudschmit and
Ulenbeck suggested the notion of intrinsic spin. This history takes the form of a biog-
raphy and is based on a distinction between the representations of the electron that
figure in theories, and the electron itself as the purportedly real unobservable entity to
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