The Discoverers (Knowledge Series Book 2)

by Daniel J. Boorstin

Faraday had sketched the outline of a surprising new invisible world. Among these infinitesimal fields of forces exerted by mysterious minute entities modern physicists would find their New Worlds and their Dark Continents, with secrets of a still wider unity and mystery of phenomena. “I have long held an opinion, almost amounting to conviction,” Faraday wrote to the Royal Society in 1845, “in common I believe with many other lovers of natural knowledge, that the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest have one common origin; or, in other words, are so directly related and mutually dependent, that they are convertible as it were, one into another, and possess equivalents of power in their action. In modern times the proofs of their convertibility have been accumulated to a very considerable extent, and a commencement made of the determination of their equivalent forces.”