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The Price of Removing the Scaffolding: Maxwell wrote something about Ampère that years later would be done to him
Abstract
In the history of physics, the name scaffolding has been given to whatever served to raise a theory and is afterwards removed because, it is said, it is no longer needed. This article documents, from the originals, what it cost Maxwell's theory when that method was applied to it: what was removed from it, who did it, with what argument, and how over the years it had to be recovered because it was understood that it was needed after all. It also records what Maxwell himself missed in Ampère, what he calls the traces of the scaffolding: the template with which Ampère himself had given shape to his work.
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BibTeX
@misc{uran2026price,
title = {{The Price of Removing the Scaffolding: Maxwell wrote something about Ampère that years later would be done to him}},
author = {María Florentina Mendoza Urán},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.28525},
eprint = {2609.28525},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.28525},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - The Price of Removing the Scaffolding: Maxwell wrote something about Ampère that years later would be done to him
AU - María Florentina Mendoza Urán
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/25
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.28525
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.28525
AB - In the history of physics, the name scaffolding has been given to whatever served to raise a theory and is afterwards removed because, it is said, it is no longer needed. This article documents, from the originals, what it cost Maxwell's theory when that method was applied to it: what was removed from it, who did it, with what argument, and how over the years it had to be recovered because it was understood that it was needed after all. It also records what Maxwell himself missed in Ampère, what he calls the traces of the scaffolding: the template with which Ampère himself had given shape to his work.
ER -