| Then there were the remarkable researches of
Faraday, the prince of experimentalists, on electrostatics and electrodynamics
and the induction of currents ... The crowning achievement was reserved
for the heaven-sent Maxwell, a man whose fame, great as it is now,
has, comparatively speaking, yet to come.
- O. Heaviside, Electromagnetic Theory vol 1 pp 13/14, 1893.
Now, there are spots before the sun, and I see no good reason why
the many faults in Maxwell's treatise should be ignored. It is most
objectionable to stereotype the work of a great man, apparently merely
because it was so great an advance, and because of the great respect
thereby induced.
- ibid, p68.
Our electrical theory has grown like a ramshackle farmhouse which
has been added to, and improved, by the additions of successive tenants
to satisfy their momentary needs, and with little regard for the future.
We regard it with affection. We have grown used to the leaks in the
roof .... But our haphazard house cannot survive for ever, and it
must ultimately be replaced by a successor whose beauty is of structure
rather than of sentiment.
- H W Heckstall-Smith, Intermediate Electrical Theory, pub. Dent,
1932, p283.
It was once told as a good joke upon a mathematician that the poor
man went mad and mistook his symbols for realities; as M for the moon
and S for the sun.
- O. Heaviside, Electromagnetic Theory vol 1 p133, 1893.
... the universe appears to have been designed by a pure mathematician.
- Sir James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe, 1931, p115.
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