Ludwig Boltzmann Praises Michael Faraday

Ludwig Boltzmann, a significant physicist in his own right, was much influenced in his thinking by a physicist of a previous generation, Michael Faraday. Boltzmann routinely praised Faraday as major thinker. Boltzmann’s admiration of Faraday is interesting because the two men differed both in temperament and in method. Boltzmann was a morose man with little hope or cheer. Faraday was an optimistic and cheerful man. More to the point, Boltzmann, like most physicists of his era, emphasized quantitative methods and quantitative descriptions as ensuring that the propositions they considered were observable and measurable. By contrast, Faraday worked in a largely non-quantitative manner; to be sure, his propositions were observational and empirical, and were perhaps quantitative in the most minimal sense of the word, but he demonstrated a singular lack of interest in equations or in any algebraic expressions of his discoveries.

While Boltzmann praised Faraday’s work, he also recognized the profound differences between himself and Faraday, and the differences between Faraday and a later generation of physicists. He was quick to acknowledge these differences, and believed that these later physicists wrongly ignored Faraday because of his alternative methods. Boltzmann was patient enough to look at Faraday’s writings for their valuable insights, despite Faraday’s departure from Boltzmann’s preferred methods. In 1892, Boltzmann wrote:

Several scientists, amongst whom Faraday is foremost, had fashioned for themselves a quite different representation of nature. Whereas the old system regarded force centers as the only reality while treating forces as mathematical concepts, Faraday saw these latter as clearly operative from point to point of intervening space; the potential function, previously a mere formula facilitating calculation, he regarded as the really existing link in space and cause of the action of forces. Faraday’s ideas were much less clear than the earlier hypotheses that had mathematical precision, and many a mathematician of the old school placed little value on Faraday’s theories, without however reaching equally great discoveries by means of his own clearer notions.

During Boltzmann’s lifetime, various philosophers were developing what would come to be known as the “picture theory” of representation. Boltzmann considered that a picture could be, if not non-quantitative, at least not primarily quantitative, but rather qualitative. While Boltzmann preferred quantitative methods, he saw Faraday as constructing new and significant “pictures” in physics in a way which was not primarily quantitative. In 1890, Boltzmann wrote:

It is a peculiar drive of the human spirit to make itself such a picture and increasingly to adapt it to the external world. If therefore we may often have to use intricate formulae to represent a part of the picture that has become complicated, they nevertheless always remain inessential if most serviceable forms of expression, and in our sense Columbus, Robert Mayer, and Faraday are genuine theoreticians. For their guiding star was not practical gain but the picture of nature within their intellect.

Boltzmann perhaps regarded Faraday as a diamond in the rough, but a diamond nonetheless. The praise which an otherwise very restrained Boltzmann heaps on Faraday is noteworthy, considering Boltzmann’s acquaintance with other major physicists like Ernst Mach. In 1899, Boltzmann wrote:

Our factual knowledge of electricity and magnetism was enormously increased by Galvani, Volta, Oerstedt, Ampere and many others, and was brought to a certain finality by Faraday. The latter, using rather limited means, had found such a wealth of new facts that it long seemed as though the future would have to confine itself merely to explaining and practically applying all these discoveries.

Faraday’s major contributions, in the standard accounts of his activity, include the discovery of benzene and the process by which gases can be liquified. But his major work was in the field of electromagnetism. He discovered the relation between magnetism and electricity, designing and constructing the world’s first electrical generator and the world’s first electrical motor. He further discovered the field of electro-chemistry, and documented the effects of electricity on chemical reactions. Faraday also discovered the effects of magnetism on light, working with polarized lenses.

Michael Faraday belonged to a movement known variously as the Sandemanian or the Glasite movement. To which extent his involvement in this movement affected his work in physics and electromagnetics is not obvious, but he was, in any case, an active leader in that organization.

Faraday greatly influenced James Clerk Maxwell. James Maxwell’s significant career in physics can be said perhaps to have consisted of a systemization of Faraday’s discoveries. Maxwell expressed mathematically what Faraday discovered observationally. James Blackmore writes:

Perhaps the easiest way to make these differences clear between how different groups of people think would be to comment on Michael Faraday’s two most famous followers, Maxwell, who put much of Faraday’s work in mathematical form and who became a hero among theoretical physicists especially Boltzmann, and Thomas Alva Edison who devoured Michael Faraday’s “merely qualitative” book Experimental Researches in Electricity (1839-1855) to lay the groundwork for inventing or improving to the point of practicality the electric light bulb, the phonograph, the dictaphone, moving pictures, and numerous other electrical instruments. Maxwell and Boltzmann might doubt the existence of power and force or consider them subordinate or superfluous factors, especially in idealized or statistical aspects of theoretical physics, but Edison and other practical inventors had no such luxury. Power or force were vital means toward virtually all practical ends in applied science, and valid methodology of science had to acknowledge that primacy.

Boltzmann was not the only thinker to praise Faraday. Jearl Walker, in a widely-used textbook, describes Faraday:

The new science of electromagnetism was developed further by workers in many countries. One of the best was Michael Faraday, a truly gifted experimenter with a talent for physical intuition and visualization. That talent is attested to by the fact that his collected laboratory notebooks do not contain a single equation. In the mid-nineteenth century, James Clerk Maxwell put Faraday’s ideas into mathematical form, introduced many new ideas of his own, and put electromagnetism on a sound theoretical basis.

Faraday’s largely intuitive approach in electromagnetics may be compared to the intuitive discoveries in mathematics made by Srinivasa Ramanujan. In any case, Faraday’s discoveries are significant not merely because he was the first to observe a specific behavior in a laboratory, but also because he was able to correctly conceptualize what he observed. He not only was the first to see these things: he was the first to understand them.