The principles of electromagnetism are essential to nearly all technology, science, and industry in the early twenty-first century. The world’s digital computing and communication systems are founded on the laws of electromagnetism, and both impossible and unimaginable without those laws.
Michael Faraday was born in 1791 in England, and his discoveries, both in the field of chemistry and in the field of electromagnetism, have shaped and built much of the world’s current and future technology.
Faraday’s scientific thought was both unique and yet founded on the work of scientists who lived prior to him. His uniqueness lies, in part, in the manner in which he conceptualized his investigations.
While electromagnetism is an inherently mathematical discipline, Faraday proceeded mainly along intuitive lines, visualizing fields as shapes rather than as equations. His written works, both published and unpublished, contain many drawings and sketches, and sometimes surprisingly few mathematical formulas.
Two of Faraday’s followers, Williams Thomson and James Maxwell, considered it their task to translate Faraday’s results into the quantified language of science.
Like Einstein a century later, Faraday made his discoveries on an intuitive level. Those discoveries had then to be repackaged into the language of mathematics, as Alan Hirshfeld writes:
In February 1854, Maxwell wrote to William Thomson, who had first “mathematized” Faraday’s lines of force, and asked for a readling list of great works on electricity and magnetism. Maxwell sought a path toward the observed phenomena untrammeled by doctrinaire thinking or mathematical abstraction. He wished to avoid what he termed “old traditions about forces acting at a distance” and instead tackle the subject without prejudice. Although Thomson’s reply is lost, there is no doubt about his prime recommendation, for soon Maxwell was immersed in Faraday’s Experimental Researches in Electricity. It didn’t take him long to realize that this was truly “a first step in right thinking.”
Faraday did his work at a time when physicists and chemists were making discoveries in large quantities. The observational and empirical natural sciences had been primed for growth by worldviews worked out in previous centuries.
The debt of modern science to the Middle Ages lies in the medieval view that there was a rational - and therefore mathematical - structure to the universe. Algebra and geometry are not only self-contained consistent systems of thought, but rather also express themselves in the mechanics of the universal.
The laws, and lawlike regularity, of motion demonstrate a rational ubiquity in the universe. On the macro scale as well as the mico - from the motions of planets and stars to the behavior of microscopic dust particles, mathematical reasoning manifests itself as the skeleton of the physical world.
The work of Thomas Bradwardine reveals how this medieval foundation underlies modern physics. Bradwardine explained how acceleration, specifically gravitational acceleration, is mathematically explained by exponential growth. In the 1300s - Bradwardine died in 1349 - he was giving an algebraic explication of the ‘Law of Falling Bodies,’ as it came to be called.
By the time of Michael Faraday, this view of the empirical sciences was becoming an almost unconscious assumption within European culture: that it was an assumption that the study of chemistry and physics was informed by algebra and geometry.
At a young age, his education still in very much in process, Faraday focused on electromagnetism. Alan Hirshfeld, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, writes:
At the dawn of the nineteenth century, science and its institutions were in flux, spurred as much by new discoveries as by the growing belief that scientific research might enhance a nation’s agricultural and industrial development. The fundamental building blocks of matter - atoms - were as yet unknown. Electricity, magnetism, heat, and light were variously “explained,” none convincingly. Through careful measurement, the mathematical character of nature’s forces could be determined, but their underlying mechanisms, interrelationships, and means of conveyance through space were subjects of dispute. Faraday plunged headlong into the melange of ideas, trying with his meager knowledge to sort out fact from fancy. All around was God’s handiwork, in plain sight, yet inextricably bound up in mystery, a seemingly limitless horizon of possibilities for off-hours study.
Eventually, Faraday’s knowledge would no longer be ‘meager’ and would enable him to make the discoveries and formulate the laws which then generated nearly all of the world’s modern electronic technology.
As an adult, Faraday took on leadership roles as his knowledge and education grew. Ian Hutchinson, Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, writes:
Throughout his long and productive life, Michael Faraday was also a committed Christian. Not a social church-goer - although he spent more hours in a pew than any of us are likely to; not just a conforming member of a “Christian” society - although he lived in a society which saw itself as Christian; on the contrary, he belonged to a distinctly nonconformist denomination, which demanded from its members an extremely high level of commitment and devotion: the Sandemanians. Moreover, in addition to his lifelong lay involvement, he acted for significant periods of his career as co-pastor (strictly ‘Elder’) of the London congregation of which he was a member. During those periods he preached (or rather, exhorted) in the services and undertook the spiritual oversight and pastoral care of the people in the congregation.
The synonymous words ‘Sandemanian’ and ‘Glasite’ (or ‘Glassite’) are usually used to describe Faraday’s thought.
The brilliance of Faraday’s work in electromagnetism may arise, in part, from the tension which exists between the absolute necessity of mathematics for his work, and his inclination to express both laws and observations intuitive concepts and images rather than formulas and equations.
