Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [16]
Perhaps that makes it sound trivial. It was not. Science is not straightforward or obvious; it is not about simply collecting enough evidence to prove a point. It is about making connections. Many studies have shown that you can hand scientists all the evidence they need to make a breakthrough, but there is no guarantee that the breakthrough will come.
André-Marie Ampère, the French scientist whose contribution has been honoured in the name given to the unit of electrical current, came at the mysterious connection between magnetism and electricity with a furious mathematical bent. But Ampère was convinced that electricity was the flow of some kind of fluid within wires, and that this flow could be modelled mathematically to expose the origin of magnetism. It got him nowhere. Faraday, on the other hand, had a simpler angle of attack: the nature of God.
To this blacksmith’s son, mathematics was a foreign language anyway. Faraday quickly got lost when he tried to follow Ampère’s arguments. ‘With regard to your theory,’ Faraday wrote to Ampère, ‘it so soon becomes mathematical that it quickly gets beyond my reach.’ And so plain Mr Faraday had to find another way forward.
The Sandemanian reading of the Bible left Faraday with a series of impressions and intuitions about how the physical world would be influenced by its Creator. In 1844, for example, he wrote a note on the nature of matter, speculating about atoms: ‘by his word’ God could have spoken ‘power into existence’ round points in space, he said.
Faraday was almost entirely alone in the scientific world in considering the role of empty space. For trained scientists, the laws of attraction and repulsion between electrical charges held at a distance, and the equivalent point-to-point gravitational attraction between masses, were as natural as breathing. As a result, they thought only in terms of the influence of something at one point on something else some distance away.
But the Bible clearly stated that God filled all of space. Isaiah’s vision of the angels who call out ‘Holy, holy holy is the Lord God Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory’ is just one of the passages that the Sandemanians claimed as a denial of any emptiness in the universe. To Faraday, intent on discovering the nature of God through His influence on the physical world, this seemingly empty space had to be of interest. It also made sense to Faraday that such divine influence could be discerned. The properties of matter ‘depend upon the power with which the Creator has gifted such matter’, he said.
According to science historian Geoffrey Cantor, Faraday saw himself as investigating a ‘perfectly designed system’ in which all events are tightly ordered by divine providence and held in a self-sustaining system with matter and force both conserved. Forces can be transformed into one another, but neither created nor destroyed by any human power.
Added to this was Faraday’s concept of symmetry: cause and effect, action and reaction, north and south. For him, everything in nature was somehow correlated with something else. And it was all subject to the law of ‘unity in diversity’. In his First Epistle to the Corinthians, St Paul said that ‘There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord.’ The lesson, to Faraday, was clear. ‘Like the members of the Sandemanian community who work in harmony for the common spiritual good,’ Cantor wrote, ‘so the different material bodies and the laws of nature cooperate with one another within the system of nature.