What is a Field in Physics? — DemystifySci
Michael Shilo DeLay; Ph D
Faraday's Fields
The word “field” appears for the first time in “On new magnetic actions” by Michael Faraday in 1846. Faraday was referring to a region in the vicinity of a magnet affected by some force. Forces, in mechanics, are actions that tend to maintain or alter the motion of a body or distort it. Faraday spent his life grappling with the mechanism by which the magnet supplied this apparent force at a distance.
Field-like regions of influence were an old idea by the time of Faraday. Abu...