Sublime

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

it was Michael Faraday’s discovery of the induction of electric current in a moving magnetic field in 1831 that eventually led to the large-scale conversion of mechanical energy into electricity

Michael Faraday—famous for his work in electromagnetism—observed that inhaling ether vapors could produce profound lethargy and insensibility to pain. Unfortunately, taking a page from Davy’s work with nitrous oxide, Faraday instead focused on the “exhilarating” properties of ether.

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,

Carl Jacobi introduced the idea with a powerful maxim: “Invert, always invert” (Man muss immer umkehren).47 Michael Faraday applied this principle to generate one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time. In 1820, Hans Christian Ørsted—who coined the term thought experiment—discovered the connection between electricity and magnetism. He n