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COLIN A. RUSSELL, Michael Faraday: Physics and Faith. Oxford Portraits in Science. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. 124. ISBN 0-19-511763-8. L15.20, $24.00 (hard-back).
ANN FULLICK, Michael Faraday. Ground-breakers. Oxford: Heinemann Library, 2000. Pp. 48. ISBN 0-431-10443-3. L11.25 (hard-back).
DOI: 10.1017/S0007087403294978
Faraday has been badly treated by his biographers. Indeed the last decent biography was that by S. P. Thompson published in 1898. A large number have been published since, but they have added nothing new, or used dubious concepts such as genius, or proposed somewhat offbeat theses. The latter category includes L. P. Williams's ponderous biography of 1965 in which he argued that Faraday was influenced by German metaphysics and was secretly committed to Boscovichian atomism and that both these guided, if not determined, the course of his experimental work. This thesis has received little support. Part of the problem was that in the mid-1960s it was not clear how experimentation could construct knowledge outside a theoretical framework. (L. P. Williams, 'Faraday and his biographers', Bulletin of the History of Chemistry (1991), 11, 9-17 admitted candidly that this was the case, but failed to draw the obvious conclusion in regard to the argument in his book by then more than a quarter of a century old.) However, the pioneering work of David Gooding during the past two decades, especially, but not exclusively on Faraday, showed how scientific knowledge, including novel theories, could be constructed from experiments. Gooding emphasized the tacit knowledge, practices, technologies and manipulations needed to develop new knowledge of the world in their social, cultural and religious contexts.
In the work undertaken on Faraday in the 1960s and 1970s there was something more at play and this was class. Historians, who generally come from a middle-class university-educated background, seemed then unable to comprehend how Faraday, the son of a dissenting blacksmith without benefit of university education, could have reached the pinnacle of scientific attainment without being merely the conduit for pre-existing ideas with no originality of his own. It is only in recent years that it has been possible to come to grips with the historical problems that...