[Toehammer]

Originally Posted by Chaboo_Cleric [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Going back to the mentions of Faraday and Maxwell:


First Maxwell was a renown mathematician. Whereas, Faraday was was virtually uneducated. He had an ace up his sleeve. Thomas West, who writes on dyslexia, points out that Faraday showed a full set of typical symptoms. He had terrible trouble with spelling and punctuation. His memory played tricks on him. He couldn't handle mathematics.

He had one more typical dyslexic trait: a powerful visual sense. He forged a finished image in his mind's eye, then he broke that image down into parts that people could understand. Maxwell tells us that Faraday built a mental picture of lines of force, filling space, shaping themselves into lovely arrays.

Nothing about Michael Faraday's life matched our aggressive images of Victorian science. He belonged to an obscure and very gentle religious sect. Science was a pleasure and it was worship. He was plain-spoken, but he electrified audiences with a simple passion for what he was doing.

Faraday drives his biographers crazy with the seeming irrationality of his thought processes. How can you start with the finished skyscraper, then build the foundation below it?

Now I run my eye over Maxwell's book on field theory. He converted Faraday's vision of force fields into mathematical language. Then he plotted the equations. They form wild graceful spider webs. And we see at last what Faraday had seen first.

Just remember Maxwell was needed to translate Faraday's second sight. Only when he did could it display its lovely surrealistic graphical form so the rest of us could see it, as well.

So overall, we can look at Faraday as a savant ( with creative genius) ,but totally lost in his own mind. Maxwell, however, did far more , despite basing a lot of his science of Faraday's distorted Savant way of thinking. Thank god for his translation....

This being just one of the examples in contrast between the two scientists. More so on their character, as oppose to their works. I prefer Maxwell a bit more to Faraday , plus Maxwells reasoning behind using preferred Newton displacement in his theories, gives Newton more swag , for being on top of the list.

I didn't say Faraday > Maxwell. My original ranking (opinion) was Newton, Maxwell, Faraday, then Einstein. Maxwell was a beast, and I do believe right next to Newton. Maxwell was much more of a mathematical powerhouse than Faraday, as you mention. However even his original mathematical formulation of electrodynamics, just like Faraday's lines of force, were a bit ahead of their time, and that is why it was difficult to present them to the common scientist (even physicist). Faraday had brilliant ideas that people were sorting out after he died. Maxwell's very confusing original equations were clarified by work of Hertz, Heaviside, Lorentz, and Einstein to an extent (by using them as a basis/assumption for relativity). The way we learn the 4 vector equations today (or 1 if you know differential geometry) today don't really resemble Maxwell's originals. So just like you argue that Maxwell illuminated Faraday's confusing skull-trapped ideas, following generations sorted out Maxwell's mess as well.

It is always difficult to deconstruct the work of true geniuses, and usually requires another genius. Faraday -> Maxwell -> Hertz/Heaviside/Lorentz/Einstein. Also, the perception that prophetic scientists sometimes seem to have irrational thought processes, does not make it a fact. To call him a savant and saying he was totally lost in his own mind is a matter of opinion. According to many accounts, he was an excellent and simple orator, and demonstrated his ideas and experiments with profound clarity. I wasn't alive, so I don't know... but Maxwell even gave most of the credit to Faraday for electromagnetic theory, just as Newton acknowledged Kepler/Galileo/Descartes for his success, and despite Faraday's poorly developed mathematics, Maxwell claimed Faraday was truly a remarkable mathematician that would influence the future. Anyone who has grown up with this concept of fields, which Faraday seemed to conjure out of thin air, knows Faraday's impact on mathematics/physics. Maxwell's formulation of electrodynamics is the most important moment in the history of mankind since Newton, but it all depended on Faraday's concept of fields.