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.
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James Clerk Maxwell, in Scientific Worthies I. - Faraday, Nature 8 (1873), p. 400Michael Faraday
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If they leave college thinking, as they usually do, that science offers a full, accurate, and literal description of man and Nature; if they think scientific research by itself yields final answers to social problems; if they think scientists are the only honest, patient, and careful workers in the world; if they think that Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, and Faraday were unimaginative plodders like their own instructors; if they think theories spring from facts and that scientific authority at any time is infallible; if they think that the ability to write down symbols and read manometers is fair grounds for superiority and pride, and if they think that science steadily and automatically makes for a better world — then they have wasted their time in the science lecture room; they live in an Ivory Laboratory more isolated than the poet's tower, and they are a plain menace to the society they belong to. They are a menace whether they believe all this by virtue of being engaged in scientific work themselves or of being disqualified from it by felt or fancied incapacity.
Jacques Barzun
Up until the publication of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, the history, philosophy, and sociology of science maintained an internalist approach to scientific knowledge claims. Science was seen as somehow above any social, political, or cultural influences, and therefore, the examinations of scientific knowledge focused on areas such as 'discoveries,' 'famous men,' and 'the scientific revolution in the West.' When Kuhn opened the door to the possibility that external factors were involved in the development of scientific paradigms, science studies assumed a more critical tone.
Thomas Samuel Kuhn
Faraday is, and must always remain, the father of that enlarged science of electro-magnetism.
Michael Faraday
I'm interested in truth, I like science. But truth's a menace, science is a public danger. As dangerous as it's been beneficent. ... It's curious ... to read what people in the time of Our Ford used to write about scientific progress. The seemed to imagine that it could go on indefinitely, regardless of everything else. Knowledge was the highest good, truth the supreme value; all the rest was secondary and subordinate. True, ideas were beginning to change even then. Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasise from truth and beauty to comfort and hapiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered. Still, in spite of everything, unrestricted scientific resarch was still permitted. People still went on talking about truth and beauty as though they were sovereign goods. Right up to the time of the Nine Years' War. That made them change their tune all right. What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you? That was when science first began to be controlled — after the Nine Years' War. People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We've gone on controlling ever since. It hasn't been very good for truth, of course. But it's been very good for happiness. One can't have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for.
Aldous Huxley
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.
Michael Faraday
Faraday, Michael
Farage, Nigel
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