‘In Nature’s School’: Faraday as an Experimentalist

Abstract

We are used to thinking about Faraday as one of the greatest experimentalists who ever lived. The success and influence of his experiments has eclipsed the processes of experimentation, so that we still know very little about the latter. In this essay I want to redress the balance by answering the question ‘What was Faraday so good at doing’? The simple answer is that Faraday was good at learning how to do experiments. The simplicity is deceptive. We tend to identify ‘experimentation’ with ‘demonstrations’, interpreting experiments through results whose significance we already know through theory. This confines experiment to the traditional roles of supporting or refuting theories against their rivals and of making phenomena and data self-evident. But these uses depend as much upon mastery of the arts of construction and presentation as they do upon actual control of natural processes. As experimentalists are well aware, experiments rarely work at first, or as expected. When they do work, it is often for the wrong reasons. The technical and observational processes that constitute an experiment are reworked until it can be performed by any competent practitioner. Why is this necessary?