I love seeing Michael Faraday’s name in here. I wouldn’t call him a childhood hero of mine, but my grandfather gave me his biography when I was like 12 or 13, and I ended up writing an essay on him in junior high.
He grew up very poor, the son of a thatcher. His father wanted better for him, so he apprenticed him to a book binder at age 14. That’s where Michael learned to read, and would stay up to the wee hours of the morning reading anything and everything he could get his hands on.
He actually started out as a chemist, studying under Humphrey Davy (iirc the man who discovered chlorine, amongst other elements). When Davy went on his first European tour, Faraday went along as both valet and assistant. Davy’s wife insisted that Michael not ride in the coach, eat with the servants, etc, because he was not from a high class family. Faraday later discovered Benzene. If I remember his biography correctly, it was the combination of a childhood fascination with electricity, combined with his work in chemistry, that sort of naturally led him to work on electromagnetism. Using various elements to make batteries, studying the transfer of electrons from one element to another, etc.
In regards to inventing the electric motor, he actually invented the electric generator first. He basically made a copper coil, and then would insert and remove a magnet from the coil, with a homemade volt meter hooked up to the coil. Once he made that discovery, that mechanical energy could be converted into electrical energy via magnetism, he worked backwards to convert electrical energy into mechanical energy. He applied his knowledge of chemistry to make homade batteries (I think technically, they weren’t even batteries, but a predecessor to batteries. He was stacking copper and led plates, with cloth soaked in something, I forget exactly what, in between each of the plates). Once he had his power supply, the actual “motor” was a copper pot, filled with liquid mercury. and then a cork attatched to an arm which pivoted around the center of the pot. Iirc, he placed a strong magnet on the cork, and then hooked up his “battery”, one wire to the pot, one wire to the magnet. His first attempts actually failed, I can’t remember exactly why, or what the eurika final step to get it to work was...but I do remember from the book that when he did get it to work, he went through the roof.
He was extremely disorganized. His lab was a disaster, and his notes were chaotic. He eventually got an assistant/apprentice who would rewrite his notes in a legible way, every single night. He would spend endless hours in his lab, to the point it effected his health, and would often only take a break when his wife would drag him home. I don’t remember this from the biography, but according to Wikipedia, he was actually very under accomplished in mathematics, with simple trigonometry being the extent of his abilities.
I’ll always be greatful to my grandpa for giving me that book
In regards to Hendrix, here’s a clip from a Joe Rogan podcast with Eric Weinstein where the get onto the genius of Hendrix, talking about the mathematics of music...even going so far as to say Hendrix may be an alien lol.
To contribute a name to the thread, here’s one I just discovered the other day:
Sam Vaknin
Born April 21 1961 in Kiryat Yam Israel, he was identified as a “gifted child” at age 8, where his IQ was tested and found to be 180, which ranked him in the top ten in the world. He was sent to study at university at age 9, started medical school at age 12. He has too many degrees to list, but along with his MD, he has a doctorate in psychology, was a physics professor, and today, is considered the world’s foremost authority in Narcissism. He has been diagnosed as being a narcissist himself, along with having multiple personality disorder, which he blames mostly on his highly unusual childhood. His diagnosis is what led him to investigate the field.
That’s not all he’s done though. Driven by his narcissism and a desire to upstage Einstein, Vaknin published a paper when he was 21 that basically rewrote all the laws of physics, deriving everything from time, and only time. It’s waaaaay over my head, but interesting none the less.
The other major contribution he’s made is that he is responsible for writing some very key lines of code in the logic sequences that are in the computer chips of every single smart phone, computer, toaster, etc.
The fascinating thing is that he does these things as “hobbies”. He claims that after publishing his physics paper, he got bored of physics, and got interested in computer science. Then he got bored of that, and moved onto the next thing. Furthermore, specific to the computer coding, he gave away his work for free, as purely an academic. The reason he doesn’t brag about his exploits in computer science, or why we don’t hear his name like Musk or Zuckerberg, is that according to him, whenever he mentions “you know, I programmed your phone...I made that work”, the first response he gets is, “how much money did you make off that,” to which he replies, “none,” to which people reply, “idiot, moron, dumbass, etc”. So for him, as a narcissist always seeking recognition, it’s too painful for him to deal with that negative criticism, so he’d just rather not mention it.
He’s not entirely clean though. His Wikipedia entry says that he went to jail for financial crimes, and apparently he can be a real asshole
Oh ya, he was also one of the founders of Wikipedia.
I randomly came across him while on a YouTube rampage. I found a whole series of interviews with him, I’ve watched most of them, and found them all quite entertaining and informative (huge range of topics covered from physics to politics, mental health, and more). Here’s one of the videos, in this one he’s talking about his physics paper
The rest of this series of interviews is on the interviewer’s channel (the Richard Gannon guy). They’re not organized on his channel, kind of all over the place, but I found them all just by scrolling down through his uploaded videos.
Some of these videos, particularly the discussion about capitalism and feudalism, kind of blew my mind, and made me look at what’s happening in the world today through a completely new lens.
Edit: I added a few more things I remembered about Faraday, and a few things from Wikipedia.
