Faraday as a Discoverer

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D. Appleton, 1868 - 171 pages
 

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Page 67 - That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man, who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it.
Page 81 - I have long held an opinion, almost amounting to conviction, in common I believe with many other lovers of natural knowledge, that the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest have one common origin; or, in other words, are so directly related and mutually dependent, that they are convertible, as it were, one into another, and possess equivalents of power in their action.
Page 7 - ... years, and during the chief part of the time bound books. Now it was in those books, in the hours after work, that I found the beginning of my philosophy. There were two that especially helped me, the ' Encyclopaedia Britannica,' from which I gained my first notions of electricity, and Mrs.
Page 123 - It would seem, therefore, that in accepting the ordinary atomic theory, space may be proved to be a non-conductor in non-conducting bodies, and a conductor in conducting bodies, but the reasoning ends in this, a subversion of that theory altogether ; for if space be an insulator it cannot exist in conducting bodies, and if it be a conductor it cannot exist in insulating bodies. Any ground of reasoning which tends to such conclusions as these must in itself be false.
Page 73 - It must, however, always be remembered that he works at the very boundaries of our knowledge, and that his mind habitually dwells in the 'boundless contiguity of shade' by which that knowledge is surrounded. In the researches now under review the ratio of speculation and reasoning to experiment is far higher than in any of Faraday's previous works. Amid much that is entangled and dark we have flashes of wondrous insight and utterances which seem less the product of reasoning than of revelation. I...
Page 152 - But then our subjects are so glorious, that to work at them rejoices and encourages the feeblest ; delights and enchants the strongest. " I have not yet seen anything from Magnus. Thoughts of him always delight me. We shall look at his black sulphur together. I heard from Schonbein the other day.
Page 125 - Wheatstone's electro-magnetic chronoscope ; but from first to last understand that I merely threw out as matter for speculation, the vague impressions of my mind, for I gave nothing as the result of sufficient consideration, or as the settled conviction, or even probable conclusion at which I had arrived.
Page 125 - ... was not possible that the vibrations which in a certain theory are assumed to account for radiation and radiant phenomena may not occur in the lines of force which connect particles and consequently masses of matter together; a notion which, as far as it is admitted, will dispense with the ether which, in another view, is supposed to be the medium in which these vibrations take place.
Page 33 - ; then walking towards the door, when the handle was in his hand he turned round and said, " Indeed I am sorry for it; it is putting new arms into the hands of the incendiary."' ' This occurred a short time after the papers had been filled with the doings of the hayrick burners. An erroneous statement of what fell from the Dean's mouth was printed at the time in one of the Oxford papers. He is...

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