Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field Quotes

“Simply hearing or reading of such things was never enough for Faraday. When assessing the work of others, he always had to repeat, and perhaps extend, their experiments. It became a lifelong habit—his way of establishing ownership over an idea.”
― Nancy Forbes, Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics

“A characteristic of Maxwell's work, indeed his life, was that he seemed to take everything in his stride—he was never hurried. Somehow, he and Katherine managed to go riding in the park most afternoons and, of course, they went on accumulating data on color vision, asking all new houseguests to have a go. They had installed the latest big color box near the window in an upstairs”
― Nancy Forbes, Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics

“But even more significant than the advance in technology is the way that Faraday and Maxwell's concept of the electromagnetic field transformed scientists’ view of the physical world. During the late decades of the nineteenth century a sea change was gradually taking place within the physics community as more and more people grasped the truth of Maxwell's warning: mechanical models cannot be relied on to explain physical phenomena, and to use them risks confusing representation and reality.”
― Nancy Forbes, Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics

“Although Maxwell had set out the theory as clearly as he could in his paper “A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field” and later in his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, almost nobody understood it during his lifetime.”
― Nancy Forbes, Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics

“It is almost impossible to overstate the scale of Faraday and Maxwell's achievement in bringing the concept of the electromagnetic field into human thought.”
― Nancy Forbes, Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics

“We shall never know what Faraday would have achieved had he mastered mathematics, but, paradoxically, his ignorance may have been an advantage. It led him to derive his theories entirely from experimental observation rather than to deduce them from mathematical models. Over time, this approach gave him a deep-seated intuition into electromagnetic phenomena. It enabled him to ask questions that had not occurred to others, to devise experiments that no one else had thought of, and to see possibilities that others had missed. He thought boldly but would never commit himself to an opinion until it had withstood the most rigorous experimental testing. As he explained in a letter to Ampère: I am unfortunate in a want to mathematical knowledge and the power of entering with facility any abstract reasoning. I am obliged to feel my way by facts placed closely together.”
― Nancy Forbes, Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics

“All of his faculties of observation, exploration, imagination, and contemplation, together with his experimental skill, meticulous record keeping, and sheer determination, would be tested to the full and not found wanting.”
― Nancy Forbes, Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics

“I have no reason to believe that the human intellect is able to weave a system of physics out of its own resources without experimental labor. Whenever the attempt had been made it has resulted in an unnatural and self-contradictory mass of rubbish.”
― Nancy Forbes, Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics

“Gradually, from 1862 onward, Faraday's health deteriorated and his mental grasp of what was going on around him crumbled; the present and the past were equally confused in his mind. In a last letter to a close friend, he wrote: My Dear Schönbein, Again and again, I tear up my letters, for I write nonsense. I cannot spell or write a line continuously. Whether I shall ever recover—this confusion—I do not know. I will not write anymore”
― Nancy Forbes, Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics

“I could trust a fact but always cross-examined an assertion”
― Nancy Forbes, Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics

“Faraday's self-education was deficient in one significant respect: he had learned no mathematics. For him, Ampère's equations might as well have been written in Egyptian hieroglyphics. We shall never know what Faraday would have achieved had he mastered mathematics, but, paradoxically, his ignorance may have been an advantage. It led him to derive his theories entirely from experimental observation rather than to deduce them from mathematical models.”
― Nancy Forbes, Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics

“Coulomb believed that each type of force was distinct: for example, electrical forces required a different type of fluid from magnetic forces, so it was impossible that one could be converted to the other. From our distant and privileged viewpoint, it is evident that Kant and Schelling were right, at least in broad terms, and that Coulomb was wrong. But things looked different in the early 1800s. Coulomb's equations were clear, elegant, and gave exact answers, while the ideas of Kant and Schelling were speculative and vague, even metaphysical.”
― Nancy Forbes, Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics

“According to Naturphilosophie, all space was filled by a web of forces that manifested themselves in various forms according to the conditions that existed locally. And along with the unity of all forces went the idea that each form of the force—light, heat, electricity, magnetism, gravitation—could be converted into any of the others under the proper experimental conditions. This was the first step toward the realization of a field theory—one in which the energy associated with physical phenomena lies in a continuous medium surrounding bodies rather than in the bodies themselves.”
― Nancy Forbes, Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics

“When a man once begins to make a theory of himself, he generally succeeds in making himself into a theory.”
― Nancy Forbes, Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics

“I know the tendency of the human mind is to do anything rather than think. But mental labor is not thought, and those who have with labor acquired the habit of application often find it much easier to get up a formula than to master a principle.”
― Nancy Forbes, Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics

“Oh! the old familiar voices! Oh! the patient waiting eyes! Let me live with them in dreamland, while the world in slumber lies.15”
― Nancy Forbes, Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics

“They come to me and they talk to me about things that belong to natural science; about mesmerism, table turning, flying through the air, about the laws of gravity; they come to me to ask questions, and they insist against me, who think I know a little of these laws, that I am wrong and they are right, in a manner that shows how little the ordinary course of education can teach these minds…. They are ignorant of their ignorance…and I say again there must be something wrong in the system of education which leaves minds, the highest taught, in such a state.”
― Nancy Forbes, Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics

“What a weak, credulous, unbelieving, superstitious, bold, frightened, what a ridiculous world ours is, as far as concerns the minds of men. How full of inconsistencies, contradictions and absurdities it is.”
― Nancy Forbes, Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics

“It is manifest that the existence of unstable conditions renders impossible the prediction of future events, if our knowledge of the present state is only approximate and not accurate.3”
― Nancy Forbes, Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics

“anglicized American named Benjamin Thompson who bore the title Count Rumford. Thompson had overlapping careers as fortune hunter, rake, philanderer, spy, military governor, inventor, park designer, scientist, and social reformer, and he can be described fairly as outstanding in all these roles. His title of count (of the Holy Roman Empire) had been bestowed by a grateful elector of Bavaria for transforming the Bavarian army from a rabble into a fit and efficient fighting force—he chose the Rumford part of the title from the town in New Hampshire”
― Nancy Forbes, Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics