19th Century
Michael Faraday
1791–1867
“His atoms, if I understand aright, are mere centres of forces or powers, not particles of matter, in which the powers themselves reside.”
Michael Faraday was an English experimental physicist at the Royal Institution in London, largely self-taught after an apprenticeship as a bookbinder. records decades of work on induction, electrolysis, and magnetic and dielectric phenomena. He came to treat the atom as a center of force whose action fills the space around it, so that the old hard particle and empty void no longer framed matter. Maxwell later gave that insight mathematical form. The field enters natural philosophy through his laboratory.
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