Looking for a book that can help with conceptual understanding of elctromagnetism and electro magnetic devices

So my neighbor is interested in electricity and magnetism. Well he's actually been watching youtube videos and thinks he can make some kind of free energy device. But anyways I thought it could be fun to do some real projects with him like playing with magnets, making a diy DC generator, and things like that. He is interested in understanding how electricity and magnetism actually works and does ask some really good questions. He has a very slight understanding of some quantum physics concepts with a hefty heap of pseudoscience in there.

So I've been trying to find a book we could work through that either has some projects in it or would be easy to learn some concepts and think of a project that involves them.
The problem I'm running into is that the books I'm finding either have absolutely no math in them or advanced high school/college level math.

I would like to find a book that has some math - but something really simple and basic. I think I'll need to walk him through some really basic math and would be nice to find a book with some relatively simple equations that are very easy to work with and see how they were derived. It would be nice to find something that slowly builds up basic math concepts as you work on projects or go through the book.

I stumbled upon A Kitchen Course in Electricity and Magnetism

This seems ALMOST exactly what I'm looking with just a few equations in it such as coulomb's law, Ohms law, lorentz force, etc.

The only downside is that it explains everything in terms of the bohr model of the atom and classical physics. Which is fine but he's really interested in what is actually happening ie quantum physics. What IS magnetism actually, electric charge, gravity, etc.

It's also a bit lacking with some of its explanations. For example it says magnetic fields are caused by electric currents. Which is a bit of a cop out since we know electric and magnetic fields actually cant exist without the other. And really gives no explanation to how a permanent magnet might work (ie unpaired electrons in the valence shell), even though use of permanent magnets are prevalent throughout the book.

So I'm trying to figure out if there's anything out there that is really basic like this but also maybe just has some basic tid bit in there about how some of this phenomena actually works on a deeper level but maybe just being conceptual at that point without any math.

Or perhaps something to supplement this book with so we can pick a concept and go a little bit deeper with it in another book - but again something that is more conceptual and light on the math.

Thanks for taking the time to read this and if you all have any suggestions I appreciate it. Cheers!

physicurious said:

So my neighbor is interested in electricity and magnetism. Well he's actually been watching youtube videos and thinks he can make some kind of free energy device.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1492656291/?tag=pfamazon01-20

berkeman said:

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https://www.amazon.com/dp/1492656291/?tag=pfamazon01-20

I was rolling my eyes but then I saw this. Is this actually right? It seems reasonable. I kind of just assumed really understanding how a magnetic field works would be more complicated than this

Well, you should make things as simple as possible, but not simpler...

vanhees71 said:

Well, you should make things as simple as possible, but not simpler...

I saw what you did there.

???