- Charlie Munger: "It's a combination of scientific biography and explanation of the physics, particularly relating to electricity. It's just the best book of its kind I have ever read, and I just hugely enjoyed it. Couldn't put it down. It was a fabulous human achievement. And neither of the writers is a physicist." source ↗
A dual biography and scientific history of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, the two men who together unlocked the mysteries of electromagnetism and laid the foundation for modern physics. Neither author is a physicist, yet the result is Munger's favorite book of its kind.
Munger recommended this on CNBC in 2014 alongside Buffett and Bill Gates, saying: 'It's just the best book of its kind I have ever read, and I just hugely enjoyed it. Couldn't put it down. It was a fabulous human achievement. And neither of the writers is a physicist.' The Faraday-Maxwell story is the ultimate first-principles case study: Faraday's experimental intuition (no formal math) combined with Maxwell's mathematical precision turned scattered observations into four equations that govern everything from light to radio. For founders, the book demonstrates how two people with different toolkits working separately can unlock something neither could alone — a partnership model directly applicable to co-founder dynamics.