Faraday's Lines of Force as Strings: from Gauss' Law to the Arrow of   Time
  We reformulate classical electromagnetism as the statistical mechanics of lines of electric flux with dynamics described by the string action in four dimensions. The retarded solution to Maxwell's equations emerges naturally as an average over a microcanonical ensemble of these lines of force at high temperature. 
Paul Mansfield
hep-th physics.class-ph