Today, we watch genius at work. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this series
about the machines that make our civilization run, and
the people whose ingenuity created them.
Calling any one person a genius is
dangerous. Genius is not some gift to only a few; it
resides in all of us. Still, few of us allow ourselves to
reach down and fully tap into that mystical capacity.
Michael Faraday was one person who did. Laying the
foundation for the theory of electricity and magnetism
was only one of his vast accomplishments.
Physicist John Tyndall was much younger than Faraday. He
was also his friend and biographer. Tyndall had this to
say about him:
When an experimental result was obtained by Faraday it
was instantly enlarged by his imagination. I am
acquainted with no mind whose power and suddenness of
expansion at the touch of new physical truth could be
ranked with his.
What Tyndall does here is offer a diagnosis of the
process we so casually write off as genius. Faraday
somehow let his mind be touched by nature in ways that
few of us do.
I've often talked about how we gain knowledge in two very
different ways: by gathering it in from the external
world, or by creating it within our minds. Tyndall
recognizes the almost magical way in which Faraday
operated in both ways at once.
Tyndall tells how, around 1847, Faraday learned that the
Italians had found that a flame responds to a magnetic
field. Faraday said,
"Flames are made of gas, but they also carry particles. Will a magnet affect a pure gas?"
He could separate air into oxygen and nitrogen, but they
were invisible. How might one see the effect of a
magnet upon them? Faraday filled soap bubbles with oxygen
and nitrogen, and floated them in a magnetic field. The
oxygen bubbles moved one way in the field, the nitrogen
bubbles moved the other.
Where then did lines of magnetic force lie? Did they have
a neutral path through space? More experiments -- testing
and rejecting more ideas. Finally, he was able to
conclude that the true path of magnetic lines did lie in
empty space, in a vacuum.
By the time Faraday had chased this interchange of logic
and experiment to the end, he knew how magnetic fields
behave. He'd determined that nitrogen is magnetically
neutral -- that it acts very much like empty space. He'd
explained magnetic storms. He'd shown how Earth's
magnetic field is distorted by atmospheric oxygen. He'd
rejected the ether hypothesis, long before it became such
a source of mischief during the quantum revolution.
Tyndall stood in awe of Faraday's astonishing thought
process -- a process that you and I might also put to
use. So let's finish with his words.
The light, which was intellectual, enabled [Faraday]
to see far beyond the boundaries of the fact itself, and
the heat, which was emotional, urged him to the conquest
of this newly-revealed domain. But though the force of
his imagination was enormous, he bridled it like a mighty
rider, and never [let] his intellect [be] overthrown.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where
we're interested in the way inventive minds work.