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- Understanding Michael Faraday's Contribution to Science: Transcending Isaac Newton's Mystery - Cosmos A Spacetime Odyssey
Understanding Michael Faraday's Contribution to Science: Transcending Isaac Newton's Mystery - Cosmos A Spacetime Odyssey
Uncover how Michael Faraday solved the enigmatic mystery that stumped Isaac Newton regarding the interaction between the sun, planets, and gravitational fields. Explore Faraday's innovative theories and experimentation that challenged the prevailing scientific views of his time.
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Video Transcript
Michael Faraday had solved the mystery that baffled Isaac Newton.
This was how the sun told the planets how to move without touching them.
The sun does touch the planets with its gravitational field.
And Earth's gravitational field tells the apples how to fall.
All this is a dream.
Unfortunately, that was the problem.
prevailing view among his fellow scientists.
Faraday was dreaming.
They admired his inventiveness
and his genius for experimentation,
but they regarded his invisible lines of force
and his ideas about light and gravity as hand-waving,
meaning there was nothing solid to back it up.
Some openly ridiculed his theories.
They needed to see his ideas expressed
in the language of modern physics, precise equations.
This was the one area where Faraday's childhood poverty
and lack of formal education actually held him back.
He couldn't do the math.
Faraday had finally hit a wall that he could not overcome.
And then the greatest theoretical physicist of the 19th century came along.
James Clark Maxwell was born into a world of wealth and privilege, an only child of
doting middle-aged parents.
By his early 20s, he had made a name for himself as a mathematician.
While other scientists had come to think of Faraday as old-fashioned,
a great figure of the past but no part of the future of physics,
James Clark Maxwell knew better.
He began by reading everything Faraday had written on electricity.
He became convinced that Faraday's fields of force were real,
and he set out to give them a precise mathematical formulation.
