3 ms·
FFS Maxwell wasn't the giant. That was Faraday. Maxwell just came along and turned Faraday's work into Greek squiggles and now everyone says what a genius he wa
by ucee054 14y ago
FFS Maxwell wasn't the giant. That was Faraday.
Maxwell just came along and turned Faraday's
work into Greek squiggles and now everyone says
what a genius he was, when it was Faraday who
did the real work.
Oh, and Faraday had a real, useful job, and his
discoveries were part of that. It was the norm
for science to be useful all the way back to
when it started, which was with Archimedes
- who was very applied, building siege engines
to defend Sicily against the Roman Navy.
This curiosity-driven "pure" research stuff was
restricted to rich people being "gentleman scientists"
until the 1940s, when governments decided to fund
everything under the sun in case some scientist might
come up with a way of very quickly killing large
numbers of Germans/Russians.
We have that to thank for the "citations are king",
"publish or perish" and "postdoc purgatory" nonsense
that is producing so many bad papers today, and I wish
science could go back to being useful like it was in
the first place.
- abhinav 14y agoA cursory look at Faraday's wikipedia page suggests that he started off as an assistant to Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution and succeeded him as the Director of the Royal Institution and became the first Fullerian Professor of Chemistry without any teaching obligations. Faraday's accomplishments are hardly unacknowledged when he is considered as one the greatest experimentalists in the history of science. Maxwell's genius lay in unifying the disparate experimental observations of Faraday into the 'right' squiggles, predicting the existence of electromagnetic waves from his equations and in the process suggesting that visible light itself may be an electromagnetic wave; an achievement worthy of celebration in my opinion.