The Shadow of Great Britain

Chapter 862: Chapter 6 The Commission of the Royal Society

“The committee’s opinion is undoubtedly: Mr. Faraday’s salary—an annual salary of £100, plus provisions for housing, coal, and candles—must not be reduced. This is because Mr. Faraday not only successfully completed the various tasks assigned to him by the Society but also displayed passion and talent in the process, which was deeply moving.

Since the discovery of electromagnetic induction, he has worked in the laboratory like a madman. He declines and rejects anything unrelated to experiments. We can hardly remember the last time Mr. Faraday went to a friend’s house for dinner, or even when he went to the theater to watch a play.

Although this may seem somewhat unkind to friends, from the perspective of academic research, his experimental journals are piling up, and papers on “Electrical Experimental Research” are being published one after another. We believe, in terms of scientific research, we cannot demand more of Mr. Faraday.

Therefore, the academic committee believes that Mr. Faraday should not only avoid a reduction in salary but should instead receive a raise. However, due to the long-standing poor financial situation of the Royal Society, the committee’s suggestion is difficult to implement, so we can only express regret…

Michael Faraday sat quietly in the reporting hall of the Royal Society, listening to the committee’s report on how to reduce expenses.

Although he was informed that he would not receive a raise, Faraday was not surprised at all. As the head of the Royal Society’s laboratory, no one understood better than him how tight the experimental funds were.

Although the Royal Society frequently receives enthusiastic donations from various sectors of society, and regularly holds scientific lectures to raise funds, this amount of money is still too little for the endless list of experiments.

The experiment list not only includes his own theoretical hypotheses he wants to verify but also numerous problems sent by various members of society.

Every morning when the Royal Society opens its doors, you can see industrialists on Elm Street requesting chemical analysis, engineers and technicians seeking assistance in solving technical problems, amateur inventors reporting new inventions, and amateur scientists discussing issues with him.

The laboratory tables are piled with various drawings waiting for his review and new products needing his analysis assistance. Sometimes, you can even see the latest progress in alchemy and perpetual motion, which is laughable.

Faraday was helpless about this, so he could only tell the Royal Society’s gatekeeper to designate three days every week to not receive visitors. Any visitors would be turned away, and if those visitors asked for the reason, they were told Mr. Faraday is on official duty and cannot meet.

And Faraday’s so-called official duty is actually experiments, but these experiments are those that he wants to conduct himself.

Yes, since the discovery of the phenomenon of electromagnetic induction, Faraday’s interest had completely turned to electromagnetism, to the extent that he almost forgot his identity as a chemist.

More than twenty years ago, when Faraday traveled the European continent with his mentor Sir Humphry Davy, he witnessed an experiment conducted by the Italian scientist Morichini. Morichini placed a steel needle under a large convex lens, aimed the lens at the sun, and focused sunlight onto the steel needle. He wanted to use sunlight to magnetize the steel needle.

Although the experiment ultimately failed, Morichini’s idea—that light and magnetism are related—left a very deep impression on Faraday.

So, when he discovered the phenomenon of electromagnetic induction, he had the idea of finding a general relationship between magnetism and light.

Since Royal Society’s optical researcher Thomas Young confirmed in 1801 with interference experiments that light is a wave, French scholars like Malus, Fresnel, and Arago have successively confirmed with experiments that light is a transverse wave, thoroughly overturning the “corpuscular theory” proposed by Sir Isaac Newton.

A wave is the propagation of vibration. To have a wave, there must be a substance that can vibrate and act as a medium to propagate this vibration. Sound waves use air as a medium, water waves use water as a medium, so what is the medium for light waves?

To explain the principle that the sun’s light waves can travel through vacuum to reach the earth, these optical researchers hypothesized that there exists a so-called “ether” substance in the vacuum through which light waves propagate.

Although most researchers accepted the theory that light propagates through “ether,” Faraday believed that if one followed the ideas of those optical researchers, then the “ether” of light must be massless, without a slightest frictional resistance, not affecting planetary motion, nor molecular and atomic movements.

Therefore, ether must be an extremely rarefied gas. However, light is a transverse wave, and transverse waves cannot propagate in gases and liquids, but only in solids, so ether must have the properties of a solid.

Ether being both an extremely rarefied gas and having the properties of a solid is a self-contradictory statement.

Such thoughts increasingly made Faraday feel that the propagation of light might not be due to ether.

Faraday believed that the so-called vacuum is a field. The field is filled with electric lines, magnetic lines, and gravitational lines, and can’t these lines vibrate? Can’t they propagate waves? Why must there be ether?

He firmly believed that the vibration of light must have a universal connection with electromagnetism.