Quotes About Faraday

I was at first almost frightened when I saw such mathematical force made to bear upon the subject, and then wondered to see that the subject stood it so well. [Letter to James Clerk Maxwell, 25 March 1857, commenting on Maxwell's paper titled "On Faraday's Lines of Force"]

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.

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

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.