It’s the birthday of one of the most iconic scientists of the modern era. This is the man who is credited with ‘Electrochemistry’ and ‘Electromagnetism’ – Micheal Faraday. An English physicist and chemist who was a great experimentalist.
What many people are not aware of Faraday is that he was a natural speaker too. He spoke things during his experiments that not only made sense in science but are equally applicable in life too.
Here are top 20 Michael Faraday Quotes
1. Nothing is too wonderful to be true if it is consistent with the laws of nature.
2. The important thing is to know how to take all things quietly.
3. Water is to me, I confess, a phenomenon which continually awakens new feelings of wonder as often as I view it.
4. The lecturer should give the audience full reason to believe that all his powers have been exerted for their pleasure and instruction.
5. As an answer to those who are in the habit of saying to every new fact, “ What is its use ?” Dr. Franklin says to such, “What is the use of an infant?” The answer of the experimentalist would be, “Endeavour to make it useful.”
6. Astonishing how great the precautions that are needed in these delicate experiments. Patience. Patience.
7. A natural law regulates the advance of science. Where only observation can be made, the growth of knowledge creeps; where laboratory experiments can be carried on, knowledge leaps forward.
8. But I must confess I am jealous of the term atom; for though it is very easy to talk of atoms, it is very difficult to form a clear idea of their nature, especially when compounded bodies are under consideration.
9. The beauty of electricity or of any other force is not that the power is mysterious, and unexpected, touching every sense at unawares in turn, but that it is under the law, and that the taught intellect can even govern it largely.
10. I could trust a fact and always cross-question an assertion.
11. I have been so electrically occupied of late that I feel as if hungry for a little chemistry: but then the conviction crosses my mind that these things hang together under one law & that the more haste we make onwards each in his own path the sooner we shall arrive, and meet each other, at that state of knowledge of natural causes from which all varieties of effects may be understood & enjoyed.
12. I have taken your advice, and the names used are an anode, cathode anions, cations, and ions; the last I shall have but little occasion for. I had some hot objections made to them here and found myself very much in the condition of the man with his son and ass who tried to please everybody; but when I held up the shield of your authority, it was wonderful to observe how the tone of objection melted away.
13. I think chemistry is being frittered away by the hairsplitting of the organic chemists; we have new compounds discovered, which scarcely differ from the known ones and when discovered are valueless—very illustrations perhaps of their refinements in the analysis, but very little aiding the progress of true science.
14. It is the great beauty of our science that advancement in it, whether in a degree great or small, instead of exhausting the subject of research, opens the doors to further and more abundant knowledge, overflowing with beauty and utility.
15. In knowledge, that man only is to be condemned and despised who is not in a state of transition.
16. Men of science, fit to teach, hardly exist. There is no demand for such men. The sciences make up life; they are important to life. The highly educated man fails to understand the simplest things of science and has no peculiar aptitude for grasping them. I find the grown-up mind coming back to me with the same questions over and over again.
17. [The new term] Physicist is both to my mouth and ears so awkward that I think I shall never use it. The equivalent of three separate sounds of I in one word is too much.
18. [I have a great] distaste for controversy…. I have often seen it do great harm, and yet remember a few cases in natural knowledge where it has helped much either to pull down error or advance truth. Criticism, on the other hand, is of much value.
19. Magnetic lines of force convey a far better and purer idea that the phrase magnetic current or magnetic flood: it avoids the assumption of a current or of two currents and also of fluids or a fluid, yet conveys a full and useful pictorial idea to the mind.
20. The secret [of my success] is comprised of three words — Work, Finish, Publish.
Here are the top 20 quotes by the iconic British scientists.
Source: Techstory
