Table of contents

This article examines changes that have taken place in laboratory safety in the past two decades. In particular, it looks at the way in which the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 is only now beginning to have proper effect.

Electricity is renowned for presenting children with conceptual problems. In an attempt to overcome these, an alternative approach to the teaching of electrical energy, voltage and current is presented.

Studying Faraday's work at the very beginning of his career can reveal the embryo of most of the subjects of his mature research.

Teachers and students are encouraged to read Faraday's own accounts of his experiments. Some may find it worthwhile to repeat some of the experiments themselves.

Faraday was convinced that, as the universe is a conservative system, gravity and electricity must be interrelated. Although he failed to detect this gravelectric effect by experiment, his search for it sheds considerable light on Faraday's science.

This article discusses Faraday's work of the late 1820s to improve optical glass for the joint Royal Society/Board of Longitude Committee set up for this purpose. It points out the importance of this work for some of Faraday's later physical researches.

Faraday's notebooks constitute one of the largest and most revealing archives left to us by a major scientist. These records reveal a good deal of systematic invention and exploration of recording techniques by Faraday, work that reveals much about his thinking about science, as well as of the role of memory in general in scientific thinking.

This article argues that we can understand the work of scientists who created new ways of seeing nature in much the same way as we understand the work of artists and composers who changed the sensibilities of their own or succeeding generations. I describe Faraday's invention of the electric motor in September 1821 to illustrate the general thesis about similarities between artistic production and the creative use of experiment in science.

The teaching of energyJ W Warren 35 St Andrews Avenue, Wembley HA0 2QB, UK