7 Quotes by Nancy Forbes

I have no reason to believe that the human intellect is able to weave a system of physics out of its own resources without experimental labor. Whenever the attempt had been made it has resulted in an unnatural and self-contradictory mass of rubbish.

All of his faculties of observation, exploration, imagination, and contemplation, together with his experimental skill, meticulous record keeping, and sheer determination, would be tested to the full and not found wanting.

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.

But even more significant than the advance in technology is the way that Faraday and Maxwell’s concept of the electromagnetic field transformed scientists’ view of the physical world. During the late decades of the nineteenth century a sea change was gradually taking place within the physics community as more and more people grasped the truth of Maxwell’s warning: mechanical models cannot be relied on to explain physical phenomena, and to use them risks confusing representation and reality.

Simply hearing or reading of such things was never enough for Faraday. When assessing the work of others, he always had to repeat, and perhaps extend, their experiments. It became a lifelong habit – his way of establishing ownership over an idea.

A characteristic of Maxwell’s work, indeed his life, was that he seemed to take everything in his stride – he was never hurried. Somehow, he and Katherine managed to go riding in the park most afternoons and, of course, they went on accumulating data on color vision, asking all new houseguests to have a go. They had installed the latest big color box near the window in an upstairs.

Although Maxwell had set out the theory as clearly as he could in his paper “A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field” and later in his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, almost nobody understood it during his lifetime.