Einstein or Newton

[Chaboo_Cleric]

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

That was a pretty entertaining post , lol. I'll send a retort when I get home, on your knighting for Faraday

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.