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Comment by jbay808 | Hacker News Reader

> At heart, Faraday was an experimentalist

This is often repeated, but I think it's a misleading label. Faraday doesn't get nearly enough credit for his theoretical prowess -- probably because he didn't develop his theories mathematically. But I would say his mental model of nature was far more accurate than most of his peers, mathematical or not, and that understanding is what guided him to groundbreaking discovery after groundbreaking discovery. He developed his experiments to confirm his own theoretical predictions, often predictions that no theoretical physicsts were making at the time; for example, the Faraday effect (that magnetism can rotate the polarization of light in a material), Faraday's law (the electromagnetic one), and Faraday's law (the chemical one).

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Agree. The guy pretty much invented field theory. Yes, Maxwell wrote the equations, but Faraday had the great conceptual insights. For more on how this evolved into modern gauge theory:

https://www.physics.umd.edu/grt/taj/675e/OriginsofMaxwelland...

You have a point but I feel when people say "theoretical" they have specific (or, more narrower) meanings. As in, if you can't express it in mathematical models, it's not "theoretical". Probably "analytical" is a better name?

So, Faraday very likely had a very good mental model and "instinctive" feel about how these things work, as you said, just that did not count as theoretical prowess.

I would say that this definition is very modern. Before about the time of Maxwell, the majority of theory was far less mathematical. I would say that it wasn't until the 1960s and 1970s, when particle and cosmological theorists became the far cutting edge of physics, that only mathematical models would be taken seriously.

Einstein's major breakthrough in special relativity wasn't a mathematical discovery, but his intuitive mental model of the impossibility of racing against a light beam. The mathematical transformation that follows from that had already been put to paper by Lorentz. But anyone would still call Einstein a theoretical physicist.

Faraday had his own theory of physics, essentially the underpinning of field theory, which was held entirely in his head. He tried to describe it to his peers in letters, and they mosy just couldn't grasp what he was talking about because of the distance between his ideas and theirs. So instead he just demonstrated in one revolutionary experiment after another that his ideas made sense, and everyone else had to race to keep up.

But unlike Oersted, Faraday didn't stumble into his discoveries. He designed his apparatus to prove the behaviour he already had imagined must be there.

(Sometimes he'd stumble by trial and error into the materials he needed, but materials science is hard and he was pretty good at that too).

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