Chemists From England

"The production of motion, molar or molecular, is governed by physical laws, which it is the business of the philosopher to find out and correlate. The law of the conservation of energy overrides all laws, and it is a preeminent canon of scientific belief that for every act done a corresponding expenditure of energy must be transformed. No work can be effected without using up a corresponding value in energy of another kind. But to us the other side of the problem is even of more importance. Granted the existence of a certain kind of molecular motion, what is it that determines its direction along one path rather than another?"

"Sir William was a member of the Society for Psychical Research from its founding in 1883 and served as president of the society from 1896 to 1899. During his investigations, Crookes discovered that a very successful spirit medium, Mary Rosina Showers, was a fraud, but said nothing and reported nothing about his discovery. He and spirit medium Daniel Dunglas Home were on a very close personal basis, and his endorsement of Home's powers has always been a strong point made by the spiritualists to support their claims about Home. However, Crookes has been shown to be a dupe of such other mediums as Florence Cook and others exposed or confessed as fakes, so his validation of Home is highly suspect."

"I have raised a question which may be regarded as heretical. At the time when our modern conception of chemistry first dawned... the average chemist... accepted the elements as ultimate facts... absolutely simple, incapable of transmutation or decomposition, each a kind of barrier behind which we could not penetrate. ...[H]e said they were self-existent from all eternity ...But in our times... we cannot help asking what are the elements, whence do they come, what is their signification? ...These elements perplex us in our researches, baffle us in our speculations, and haunt us in our very dreams. They stretch like an unknown sea before us—mocking, mystifying and murmuring strange revelations and possibilities. If I venture to say that... elements are not simple and primordial... but have evolved from simpler matters—or... one sole kind of matter—I... give formal utterance to an idea... for some time "in the air" of science. Chemists, physicists, philosophers of the highest merit declare explicitly their belief that the seventy... elements of our text-books are not the which we must never hope to pass."

"Which was first, Matter or Force? If we think on this question, we shall find that we are unable to conceive of matter without force, or force without matter. When God created the elements of which the earth is composed, He created certain wondrous forces, which are set free and become evident when matter acts on matter."

"Ubi Crookes Ibi Lux."

"The task I am called upon to perform today is to my thinking by no means a merely formal or easy matter. It fills me with deep concern to give an address, with such authority as a president's chair confers, upon a science which, though still in a purely nascent stage, seems to me at least as important as any other science whatever. Psychical science, as we here try to pursue it, is the embryo of something which in time may dominate the whole world of thought. This possibility — nay, probability — does not make it the easier to me now. Embryonic development is apt to be both rapid and interesting; yet the Prudent man shrinks from dogmatizing on the egg until he has seen the chicken."

"One's tendency when one is young is to do experiments just to see what will happen, without really looking for specific things at all. I first set up a little laboratory in the attic at home just to grow crystals or try experiments described in books, such as adding a lot of concentrated sulfuric acid to the blood from a nosebleed which precipitates hemotin from the hemoglobin in the blood. That was quite a nice experiment. I still remember it."

"Would it not be better if one could really 'see' whether molecules...were just as experiments suggested?"

"I once wrote a lecture for Manchester University called « Moments of Discovery » in which I said that there are two moments that are important. There's the moment when you know you can find out the answer and that's the period you are sleepless before you know what it is. When you've got it and know what it is, then you can rest easy."

"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?"

"Try as I might, I could never feel any great affection for a man who so much resembled a Baked Alaska – sweet, warm and gungy on the outside, hard and cold within."

"Two polar groups: at one pole we have the literary intellectuals, at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension."

"When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find that far more, and far more hideous, crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion."

"I was searching for something a little more than a dashing metaphor, a good deal less than a cultural map: and for those purposes the two cultures is about right."

"There are no secrets in science."

"I believe the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups ... Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension."

"The official world, the corridors of power."

"There is, of course, no complete solution. […] But we can do something. The chief means open to us is education […] There is no excuse for letting another generation be as vastly ignorant, or as devoid of understanding and sympathy, as we are ourselves."

"Once the press learnt of her success, she was called 'the girl from Mars'."

"Reporter: After circling the planet for eight days, what was your most memorable impression of the earth from outer space? Helen Sharman: [Said without hesitation] There are no borders."

"There is very little difference between men and women in space."

"The conception of lines of force was introduced by Faraday to form a mental picture of the processes going on in the electric field. To him these lines were not mere mathematical abstractions. He ascribed to them properties that gave them a real physical significance. They terminate on opposite charges, are always in a state of tension, tending to shorten themselves, and are mutually repellent. The direction of a line of force at any point gives the direction of the field at that point. With the help of these properties of lines of force it is possible to obtain an idea of the distribution of the intensity of the field surrounding electrically charged bodies. The idea of tubes of force has been introduced to make the method of Faraday metrical rather than merely descriptive. A tube of force is obtained by drawing a number of lines of force through the boundary of any small closed curve. The lines then form a tubular surface, which, it can be proved, will never be cut by any lines of force, and the extremities of which enclose equal and opposite charges. By properly choosing the area of the surface enclosed by the curve through which the lines are drawn the extremities of the tube can be made to enclose unit charge. Such a unit tube is called a Faraday tube. Maxwell and J. J. Thomson have made an exhaustive study of these tubes of force and expressed their properties in mathematical terms. The result that interests us here is that a tube of force behaves as though it had inertia, so that in order to move a tube work must be done. This explains why a charge behaves as if it had mass. It must be remarked that the conception of tubes of forces is used here merely to aid in understanding the phenomena. Whether or not tubes of force, or even the ether, possess any physical significance is a question. Modern developments seem to indicate that this question must be answered in the negative."

"His health [was] probably affected by mercury poisoning. This was a then unrealized health hazard that undoubtedly affected many nineteenth-century scientists who worked in the laboratory, where spilled mercury often accumulated between and beneath floorboards and generated a permanent atmosphere of mercury vapor."

"Gradually... during the second half of the nineteenth century, the uncomfortable feeling of dislike of the action at a distance, which had been so strong in Huygens and other contemporaries of Newton, but had subsided during the eighteenth century, began to emerge again, and gained strength rapidly. This was favoured by the purely mathematical transformation (which can be compared in a sense with that from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican system), replacing Newton's finite equations by the differential equations, the potential becoming the primary concept, instead of the force, which is only the gradient of the potential. These ideas, of course, arose first in the theory of electricity and magnetism or perhaps one should say in the brain of Faraday."

"To estimate the intensity of Faraday's scientific power, we cannot do better than read the first and second series of his Researches and compare them...with the whole course of electro-magnetic science since, which has added no new idea to those set forth, but has only verified the truth and scientific value of every one of them."

"In 1831 his original researches began to center about the relation of electricity and magnetism. ...Even as early as 1824 he had noticed the effects of a current of electricity upon a magnet. Now he found that this electrical action could be increased if the wire carrying the current was made into a coil. From that point he went on to study the push or pulling action of the coil upon the magnet, the effect of having a coil of more turns, and a way by which the coil and magnet, if free to move, could be made to move around each other. He was working out the principles that operate in today's electric motors. By 1831 he had reversed the problem... He had shown that the mere motion of the magnet within a closed-end coil was enough to set moving through the coil a small current that had not been there before. He called this new current an "induced" one and proceeded to study how the current could be increased in its quantity and intensity. The experimental results were revolutionary. The principles of induction discovered by Faraday are used today in telephones, induction coils, electric generators, transformers, the motors of electric clocks, and dozens of other pieces of electrical equipment."

"He was little interested mathematics or theory; for example, when his ideas on magnetic fields were extensively developed later by James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), Faraday was little concerned with the results. His own scientific career was characterized by simple ideas and simple experiments."

"As a philosopher, his first great characteristic was the trust which he put in facts. He said of himself, "In early life I was a very lively imaginative person, who could believe in the Arabian Nights as easily as in the Encyclopedia, but facts were important to me, and saved me. I could trust a fact." Over and over again he showed his love of experiments in his writings and lectures: "Without experiment I am nothing." "But still try, for who knows what is possible?" "All our theories are fixed upon uncertain data, and all of them want alteration and support from facts." "One thing, however, is fortunate, which is, that whatever our opinions, they do not alter nor derange the laws of nature." His second great characteristic was his imagination. It rose sometimes to divination, or scientific second sight, and led him to anticipate results that he or others afterwards proved to be true."

"It is not till we attempt to bring the theoretical part of our training into contact with the practical that we begin to experience the full effect of what Faraday has called "mental inertia"—not only the difficulty of recognising, among the concrete objects before us, the abstract relation which we have learned from books, but the distracting pain of wrenching the mind away from the symbols to the objects, and from the objects back to the symbols. This however is the price we have to pay for new ideas."

"If the idea of physical reality had ceased to be purely atomic, it still remained for the time being purely mechanistic; people still tried to explain all events as the motion of inert masses; indeed no other way of looking at things seemed conceivable. Then came the great change, which will be associated for all time with the names of Faraday, Clerk Maxwell, and Hertz."

"Faraday was the first scientist to realise the enormous importance of the electromagnetic field. He saw in it a reality of a new category differing from matter. It was capable of transmitting effects from place to place, and was not to be likened to a mere mathematical fiction such as the gravitational field was then assumed to be. In his opinion, the phenomena of electricity and magnetism should be approached via the field rather than via the charged bodies and currents. In other words, according to Faraday, when a current was flowing along a wire, the most important aspect of the phenomenon lay not in the current itself but in the fields of electric and magnetic force distributed throughout space in the current's vicinity. It is this elevation of the field to a position of preeminence that is often called the pure physics of the field. Faraday was not a mathematician and was unable to co-ordinate the phenomena he foresaw in a mathematical way, and derive the full benefit from his ideas. Before dying, however, he entrusted this task to his colleague Maxwell; and one of the most astonishing theories of science, eclipsed only in recent years by Einstein's theory of relativity, was the outcome."

"Would Faraday have discovered the law of electromagnetic induction if he had received a regular college education?"

"An intimate friend of Faraday once described to me how, when Faraday was endeavouring to explain to Gladstone and several others an important new discovery in science Gladstone's only commentary was “but, after all, what use is it?” “Why, sir,” replied Faraday, “there is every probability that you will soon be able to tax it!”"

"I shall be with Christ, and that is enough."

"Faraday found no conflict between his religious beliefs and his activities as a scientist and philosopher. He viewed his discoveries of nature's laws as part of the continual process of "reading the book of nature", no different in principle from the process of reading the Bible to discover God's laws. A strong sense of the unity of God and nature pervaded Faraday's life and work."

"With the realization that electric currents make magnetic fields, people immediately suggested that, somehow or other, magnets might also make electric fields. Various experiments were tried. For example, two wires were placed parallel to each other and a current was passed through one of them in the hope of finding a current in the other. The thought was that the magnetic field might in some way drag the electrons along in the second wire, giving some such law as "likes prefer to move alike." With the largest available current and the most sensitive galvanometer to detect any current, the result was negative. Large magnets next to wires also produced no observed effects. Finally, Faraday discovered in 1840 the essential feature that had been missed—that electric effects exist only when there is something changing. If one of a pair of wires has a changing current, a current is induced in the other, or if a magnet is moved near an electric circuit, there is a current. We say that currents are induced. This was the induction effect discovered by Faraday. It transformed the rather dull subject of static fields into a very exciting dynamic subject with an enormous range of wonderful phenomena."

"I have been favoured by a sight of the forthcoming series of Dr. Faraday's admirable "Researches;" in which that assiduous and successful philosopher labours to prove by experiment that electrical induction is transmitted to distant bodies by intervening matter."

"Faraday is, and must always remain, the father of that enlarged science of electro-magnetism."

"The lecturer should give the audience full reason to believe that all his powers have been exerted for their pleasure and instruction."

"Faraday carried on experimenting until he was over 70. He died in 1867, the year that Das Kapital was published, and he was buried in Highgate cemetery... where Marx was to join him later."

"A point highly illustrative of the character of Faraday now comes into view. He gave an account of his discovery of Magneto-electricity in a letter to his friend M. Hachette, of Paris, who communicated the letter to the Academy of Sciences. The letter was translated and published ; and immediately afterwards two distinguished Italian philosophers took up the subject, made numerous experiments, and published their results before the complete memoirs of Faraday had met the public eye. This evidently irritated him. He reprinted the paper of the learned Italians in the Philosophical Magazine accompanied by sharp critical notes from himself. He also wrote a letter dated Dec. 1,1832, to Gay Lussac, who was then one of the editors of the Annales de Chimie in which he analysed the results of the Italian philosophers, pointing out their errors, and' defending himself from what he regarded as imputations on his character. The style of this letter is unexceptionable, for Faraday could not write otherwise than as a gentleman; but the letter shows that had he willed it he could have hit hard. We have heard much of Faraday's gentleness and sweetness and tenderness. It is all true, but it is very incomplete. You cannot resolve a powerful nature into these elements, and Faraday's character would have been less admirable than it was had it not embraced forces and tendencies to which the silky adjectives "gentle" and "tender" would by no means apply. Underneath his sweetness and gentleness was the heat of a volcano. He was a man of excitable and fiery nature; but through high self-discipline he had converted the fire into a central glow and motive power of life, instead of permitting it to waste itself in useless passion. "He that is slow to anger" saith the sage, "is greater than the mighty, and he that ruleth his own spirit than he that taketh a city." Faraday was not slow to anger, but he completely ruled his own spirit, and thus, though he took no cities, he captivated all hearts."

"The experimental researches of Faraday are so voluminous, their descriptions are so detailed, and their wealth of illustration is so great, as to render it a heavy labour to master them. The multiplication of proofs, necessary and interesting when the new truths had to be established, are however less needful now when these truths have become household words in science."

"The important thing is to know how to take all things quietly."

"As when on some secluded branch in forest far and wide sits perched an owl, who, full of self-conceit and self-created wisdom, explains, comments, condemns, ordains and order things not understood, yet full of importance still holds forth to stocks and stones around — so sits and scribbles Mike."

"The secret is comprised in three words — Work, Finish, Publish."

"I am, I hope, very thankful that in the withdrawal of the powers and things of life, the good hope is left with me, which makes the contemplation of death a comfort — not a fear. Such peace is alone the gift of God, and as it is He who gives it, why should we be afraid? His unspeakable gift in His beloved Son is the ground of no doubtful hope, and there is the rest for those who (like you and me) are drawing near the latter end of our terms here below. I do not know, however why I should join you with me in years. I forget your age, but this I know (and feel as well) that next Sabbath day (the 22nd) I shall complete my 70th year. I can hardly think myself so old as I write to you — so much of cheerful spirit, ease and general health is left to me, and if my memory fails, why it causes that I forget troubles as well as pleasure and the end is, I am happy and content."

"Speculations? I have none. I am resting on certainties. I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day."

"Whereas, according to the declaration of that true man of the world Talleyrand, the use of language is to conceal the thoughts; this is to declare in the present instance, when I say I am not able to bear much talking, it means really, and without any mistake, or equivocation, or oblique meaning, or implication, or subterfuge, or omission, that I am not able; being at present rather weak in the head, and able to work no more."

"When his faculties were fading fast, he would sit long at the western window, watching the glories of the sunset; and one day, when his wife drew his attention to a beautiful rainbow that spanned the sky, he looked beyond the falling shower and the many-colored arch, and observed, "He hath set his testimony in the heavens." On August 25, 1867, quietly, almost imperceptively, came the release. There was a philosopher less on earth, and a saint more in heaven."

"We learn by such results as these, what is the kind of education that science offers to man. It teaches us to be neglectful of nothing, not to despise the small beginnings — they precede of necessity all great things. Vesicles make clouds; they are trifles light as air, but then they make drops, and drops make showers, rain makes torrents and rivers, and these can alter the face of a country, and even keep the ocean to its proper fulness and use. It teaches a continual comparison of the small and great, and that under differences almost approaching the infinite, for the small as often contains the great in principle, as the great does the small; and thus the mind becomes comprehensive. It teaches to deduce principles carefully, to hold them firmly, or to suspend the judgment, to discover and obey law, and by it to be bold in applying to the greatest what we know of the smallest. It teaches us first by tutors and books, to learn that which is already known to others, and then by the light and methods which belong to science to learn for ourselves and for others; so making a fruitful return to man in the future for that which we have obtained from the men of the past."