Faraday, Maxwell, and the Unification of Light and Electromagnetism

Faraday, despite lacking formal mathematical training, developed an intuitive but profoundly influential way of picturing electric and magnetic effects: instead of forces acting instantaneously across empty space, he imagined "lines of force" filling the region around a magnet or charge, made visible in his famous experiments scattering iron filings around a bar magnet. This field concept rejected the idea of action at a distance and treated space itself as physically structured, laying the conceptual groundwork that a later generation of physicists would turn into rigorous mathematics.