Sublime

Within a few years, James Clerk Maxwell transforms Faraday’s visionary insight into a system of equations describing the fields. He grasps that light is nothing but a swift ripple upon these webs, and that these ripples, at greater wavelengths, can bear signals. Hertz reproduces them in the laboratory,

“ To see the beauty of the Maxwell theory it is necessary to move away from mechanical models and into the abstract world of fields. To see the beauty of quantum mechanics it is necessary to move away from verbal descriptions and into the abstract world of geometry. Mathematics is the language that nature speaks. The language of mathematics makes t

Faraday’s experiments, simple and elegant, were carefully recorded in lab books that he bound himself, remembering the profession he had so happily left. In modern language, we would say he was a great chemist and a great physicist; Faraday described himself as a natural philosopher. With an uncanny gift for recognizing the salient points of an exp