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Part One 
GENESIS 
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Chapter 1 
FROM THE ARMOIRE TO 
THE CAVE 
The simple inherit folly, but the prudent are crowned 
with knowledge. 
-PROVERBS 14:18 
L my beginning there was light. 
Surely there was light at the beginning of time, but before we can get to 
the beginning of time, we will need to explore our own beginnings, which 
also means exploring the beginning of science. And that means returning 
to the ultimate motive for both science and religion: the longing for some-
thing else. Something beyond the universe of our experience. 
For many people, that longing translates into something that gives 
meaning and purpose to the universe and extends to a longing for some 
hidden place that is better than the world in which we live, where sins 
are forgiven, pain is absent, and death does not exist. Others, however, 
long for a hidden place of a very different sort, the physical world beyond 
our senses, the world that helps us understand how things behave the 
way they do, rather than why. This hidden world underlies what we ex-
perience, and the understanding of it gives us the power to change our 
lives, our environment, and our future. 
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THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD-SO FAR 
The contrast between these two worlds is reflected in two very dif-
ferent works of literature. 
The first, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C. S. Lewis, is a 
twentieth-century children's fantasy with decidedly religious overtones. It 
captures a childhood experience most of us have had—looking under the 
bed or in the closet or in the attic for hidden treasure or evidence that there 
is more out there than what we normally experience. In the book, several 
schoolchildren discover a strange new world, Narnia, by climbing into a 
large wardrobe in the country house outside London where they have been 
sequestered for their protection during the Second World War. The chil-
dren help save Narnia with the aid of a lion, who lets himself be humiliated 
and sacrificed, Christlike, at an altar in order to conquer evil in his world. 
While the religious allusion in 
story is clear, we can also in-
terpret it in another way—as an allegory, not for the existence of God or 
the devil, but rather for the remarkable and potentially terrifying possi-
bilities of the unknown, possibilities that lie just beyond the edge of our 
senses, just waiting for us to be brave enough to seek them out. Possibili-
ties that, once revealed, may enrich our understanding of ourselves or, 
for some who feel a need, provide a sense of value and purpose. 
The portal to a hidden world inside the wardrobe is at once safe, with 
the familiar smell of oft-worn clothes, and mysterious. It implies the need 
to move beyond classical notions of space and time. For if nothing is 
revealed to an observer who is in front of or behind the wardrobe, and 
something is revealed only to someone inside, then the space experienced 
inside the wardrobe must be far larger than that seen from its outside. 
Such a concept is characteristic of a universe in which space and time 
can be dynamical, as in the General Theory of Relativity, where, for ex-
ample, from outside the "event horizon" of a black hole—that radius inside 
of which there is no escape—a black hole might appear to comprise a 
small volume, but for an observer inside (who has not yet been crushed 
to smithereens by the gravitational forces present), the volume can look 
quite different. Indeed, it is possible, though beyond the domain where we 
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11 
can perform reliable calculations, that the space inside a black hole might 
provide a portal to another universe disconnected from our own. 
But the central point I want to return to is that the possibility of 
universes beyond our perception seems to be tied, in the literary and 
philosophical imagination, at least, to the possibility that space itself is 
not what it seems. 
The harbinger of this notion, the "ur" story if you will, was written 
twenty-three centuries before Lewis penned his fantasy. I refer to Plato's 
Republic, and in particular to my favorite section, the Allegory of the Cave. 
But in spite of its early provenance, it illuminates more directly and more 
clearly both the potential necessity and the potential perils of searching 
for understanding beyond the reach of our immediate senses. 
In the allegory, Plato likens our experience of reality to that of a 
group of individuals who live their entire lives imprisoned inside a cave, 
forced to face a blank wall. Their only view of the real world is that wall, 
which is illuminated by a fire behind them, and on which they see shad-
ows moving. The shadows come from objects located behind them that 
the light of the fire projects on the wall. 
I show the drawing below, which came from the high school text in 
which I first read this allegory, in a 1961 translation of Plato's dialogues. 
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THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD-SO FAR 
The drawing is amusing because it clearly reflects as much about the 
time it was drawn as it does the configuration of the cave described in 
the dialogue. Why, for example, are the prisoners here all women, and 
scantily clad ones at that? In Plato's day, any sexual allusion might easily 
have displayed young boys. 
Plato argues that the prisoners will view the shadows as reality and 
even give them names. This is not unreasonable, and it is, in one sense, 
as we shall soon see, a very modern view of what reality is, namely that 
which we can directly measure. My favorite definition of reality still is 
that given by the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who said, "Reality 
is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." For the 
prisoners, the shadows are what they see. They are also likely to hear 
only the echoes of noises made behind them as the sounds bounce off 
the wall. 
Plato likened a philosopher to a prisoner who is freed from bondage 
and forced, almost against his will, to not only look at the fire, but to 
move past it, and out to the daylight beyond. First, the poor soul will be 
in distress, with the glare of the fire and the sunshine beyond the cave 
hurting his eyes. Objects will appear completely unfamiliar; they will 
not resemble their shadows. Plato argues that the new freeman may still 
imagine the shadows that he is used to as truer representations than the 
objects themselves that are casting the shadows. 
If the individual is reluctantly dragged out into the sunshine, ulti-
mately all of these sensations of confusion and pain will be multiplied. 
But eventually, he will become accustomed to the real world, will see the 
stars and Moon and sky, and his soul and mind will be liberated of the 
illusions that had earlier governed his life. 
If the person returns to the cave, Plato argues, two things would hap-
pen. First, because his eyes would no longer be accustomed to the dark-
ness, he would be less able to distinguish the shadows and recognize 
them, and his compatriots would view him as handicapped at best, and 
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13 
dim at worst. Second, he would no longer view the petty and myopic 
priorities of his former society, or the honors given to those who might 
best recognize the shadows and predict their future, as worthy of his 
respect. As Plato poetically put it, quoting from Homer: 
"Better to be the poor servant of a poor master, and to endure any-
thing, rather than think as they do and live after their manner." 
So much for those whose lives are lived entirely in illusion, which 
Plato suggests includes most of humanity. 
Then, the allegory states that the journey upward—into the light—is 
the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world. 
Clearly in Plato's mind only a retreat to the purely "intellectual 
world," a journey reserved for the few—aka philosophers—could replace 
illusion with reality. Happily, that journey is far more accessible today 
using the techniques of science, which combine reason and reflection 
with empirical inquiry. Nevertheless, the same challenge remains for 
scientists today: to see what is behind the shadows, to see that which, 
when you drop your preconceptions, doesn't disappear. 
While Plato doesn't explicitly mention it, not only would his fellow 
prisoners view the poor soul who had ventured out and returned as 
handicapped, but they would likely think he was crazy if he talked about 
the wonders that he had glimpsed: the Sun, the Moon, lakes, trees, and 
other people and their civilizations. 
This idea is strikingly modern. As the frontiers of science have moved 
further and further away from the world of the familiar and the world 
of common sense as inferred from our direct experience, our picture of 
the reality underlying our experience is getting increasingly difficult for 
us to comprehend or accept. Some find it more comforting to retreat to 
myth and superstition for guidance. 
But, we have every reason to expect that "common sense," which first 
evolved to help us cope with predators in the savannas of Africa, might 
lead us astray when we attempt to think about nature on vastly differ-
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ent scales. We didn't evolve to intuitively understand the world of the 
very small, the very big, or the very fast. We shouldn't expect the rules 
we have come to rely on for our daily lives to be universal. While that 
myopia was useful from an evolutionary perspective, as thinking beings 
we can move beyond it. 
In this regard, I cannot resist quoting one last admonition in Plato's 
allegory: 
"In the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all and is 
seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the au-
thor of all things good and right, parent of light, and ... the immediate 
source of reason and truth." 
Plato further argues that this is what those who would act rationally 
should strive for, in both public and private life—seeking the "good" by 
focusing on reason and truth. He suggests that we can only do so by 
exploring the realities that underlie the world of our direct experience, 
rather than by exploring the illusions of a reality that we might want 
to exist. Only through rational examination of what is real, and not by 
faith alone, is rational action—or good—possible. 
Today, Plato's vision of "pure thought" has been replaced by the sci-
entific method, which, based on both reason and experiment, allows 
us to discover the underlying realities of the world. Rational action in 
public and private life now requires a basis in both reason and empiri-
cal investigation, and it often requires a departure from the solipsistic 
world of our direct experience. This principle is the source of most of 
my own public activism in opposition to government policies based on 
ideology rather than evidence, and it is also probably why I respond so 
negatively to the concept of the "sacred"—implying as it does some idea 
or admonition that is off-limits to public questioning, exploration, dis-
cussion, and sometimes ridicule. 
It is hard to state this view more strongly than I did in a New Yorker 
piece: 'Whenever scientific claims are presented as unquestionable, 
they undermine science. Similarly, when religious actions or claims 
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15 
about sanctity can be made with impunity in our society, we undermine 
the basis of modern secular democracy. We owe it to ourselves and to 
our children not to give a free pass to governments—totalitarian, theo-
cratic, or democratic—that endorse, encourage, enforce, or otherwise 
legitimize the suppression of open questioning in order to protect ideas 
that are considered 'sacred.' Five hundred years of science have liberated 
humanity from the shackles of enforced ignorance! 
Philosophical reflections aside, the prime reason I am introducing 
Plato's cave here is that it can provide a concrete example of the nature 
of the scientific discoveries at the heart of the story I want to tell. 
Imagine a shadow that our prisoners might see on the wall, displayed 
by an evil puppeteer located on a ledge in front of the fire: 
This shadow displays both length and directionality, two concepts 
that we, who are not confined to the cave, take for granted. 
However, as the prisoners watch, this shadow changes: 
Later it looks like this: 
And again later like this: 
And later still, like this: 
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What would the prisoners infer from all of this? Presumably, that 
concepts such as length or direction have no absolute meaning. The ob-
jects in their world can change both length and directionality arbitrarily. 
In the reality of their direct experience, neither length nor directionality 
appears to have significance. 
What will the natural philosopher, who has escaped to the surface to 
explore the richer world beyond the shadows, discover? He will see that 
the shadow is first of all just a shadow: a two-dimensional image on the 
wall cast from a real, three-dimensional object located behind the pris-
oners. He will see that the object has a fixed length that never changes, 
and that it's accompanied by an arrow that is always on the same side of 
the object. From a vantage point slightly above the object, he sees that 
the series of images results from the projection of a rotating weather 
vane onto the wall: 
When he returns to join his former colleagues, the philosopher-
scientist can explain that an absolute quantity called length doesn't change 
over time, and that directionality can be assigned unambiguously to cer-
tain objects as well. He will tell his friends that the real world is three-
dimensional, not two-dimensional, and that once they understand, all of 
their confusion about the seemingly arbitrary changes will disappear. 
Would they believe him? It would be a tough sell because they won't 
have an intuitive idea of what a rotation is (after all, with an intuition 
based purely on two-dimensional experience, it would likely be difficult 
to "picture" mentally any rotations in a third dimension). Blank stares? 
Probably. The loony bin? Maybe. However, he might win over the com-
munity by stressing attractive characteristics associated with his claim: 
behavior that on the surface appears to be complex and arbitrary can be 
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17 
shown to result from a much simpler underlying picture of nature, and 
seemingly disparate phenomena are actually connected and can be part 
of a unified whole. 
Better still, he could make predictions that his friends could test. 
First, he could argue that, if the apparent change in length of the shadows 
measured by the group is really due to a rotation in a third dimension, 
whenever the length of the object briefly vanishes, it will immediately 
reemerge with the arrow pointing in the opposite direction. Second, he 
could argue that as the length oscillates, the maximum length of the 
shadow when the arrow is pointing in one direction will always be ex-
actly the same as the maximum length of the shadow when it is pointing 
in the other direction. 
Plato's cave thus becomes an allegory for far more than he may have 
intended. Plato's freed man discovers the hallmarks of the remarkable 
true story of our own struggle to understand nature on its most fun-
damental scales of space, time, and matter. We too have had to escape 
the shackles of our prior experience to uncover profound and beauti-
ful simplifications and predictions that can be as terrifying as they are 
wonderful. 
But just as the light beyond Plato's cave is painful to the eyes at first, 
with time it becomes mesmerizing. And once witnessed, there is no 
going back. 
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Chapter 2 
SEEING IN THE DARK 
Let there be light: and there was light 
-GENESIS 1:3 
L the beginning there was light. 
It is no coincidence that the ancients imagined in Genesis that light 
was created on the first day. Without light, there would be little aware-
ness of the vast universe surrounding us. When we nod and say, 1 see," 
to a friend who is trying to explain something, we convey far more than 
just an observation, but rather a fundamental understanding. 
Plato's allegory was appropriately centered on light—light from a 
fire to cast the shadows on the cave wall and light from the outside to 
temporarily blind the freed prisoner and then illuminate the real world 
for him. Like the prisoners in the cave, we too are prisoners of light—
almost everything we learn about the world we learn from what we see. 
While the most significant words in the Western religious canon 
may be Let there be light, in the modern world this phrase now has a 
completely different significance from what it once did. Human beings 
may be prisoners of light, but so is the universe. What once appeared as 
a whim of a Judeo-Christian God, or other gods before that one, we now 
understand to be required by the very laws that allow both heaven, and 
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more important, Earth, to exist. You cannot have one without the other. 
Earth, or matter, follows light. 
This change in perception underlies almost every development in 
the edifice we call modern science. I am writing these words as I stare 
out from a ship at one of the Galapagos Islands, which Charles Darwin 
made famous, and which made him famous in return, as he changed 
our perception of life and its diversity with a single brilliant realiza-
tion: that all living species developed through the natural selection of 
small inherited variations that are passed along to future generations by 
survivors. As surely as the understanding of evolution changed every-
thing about our understanding of biology, our changing understanding 
of light changed everything about our physical understanding of our 
place in the universe. As a useful fringe benefit, this change resulted in 
virtually all of the technology on which the modern world is based. 
The extent to which our observations of the world imprison our 
minds, and frame our description of the fabric of the universe, remained 
unappreciated for more than twenty centuries following Plato. Once se-
rious minds began to investigate in detail the hidden nature of the uni-
verse, it took over four centuries for them to fully resolve the question 
What is light? 
Perhaps the most serious modern mind, although certainly not 
the first, to ask this question was also one of the most famous—and 
oddest—scientists in history: Isaac Newton. It is not inappropriate to 
classify Newton as a modern mind—after all, his seventeenth-century 
Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy uncovered 
the classical laws of motion and laid the basis for his theory of gravity, 
both of which form the foundation of much of modern physics. Never-
theless, as John Maynard Keynes pointed out: 
Newton was not the first of the age of reason, he was the last of the 
magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last 
great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world 
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with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual 
inheritance rather less than to,000 years ago. 
The truth of this statement reflects the revolutionary importance 
of Newton's work. After the Principia, no rational person could view 
the world the same way the ancients had viewed it. But it also reflects 
the character of Newton himself. He devoted far more time, and far 
more ink, to writing about the occult, alchemy, and searching for hidden 
meanings and codes in the Bible—focusing in particular on the Book of 
Revelation and mysteries associated with the ancient Temple of Solo-
mon—than he did to writing about physics. 
Newton was also one in a long line of people, which extends before 
and after him, who felt that he had been specifically chosen by God to 
help reveal the true meaning of the Scriptures. To what extent his stud-
ies of the universe derived from his fascination with the Bible is not 
clear, but it does seem reasonable to conclude that his primary interest 
was in theology, and that natural philosophy came in well below that, 
and probably below alchemy as well. 
Many individuals point to Newton's fascination with God as evi-
dence of the compatibility between science and religion, and to assert 
that modern science owes its existence to Christianity. This confuses 
history with causality. It is undeniable that many of the early giants 
of modern Western natural philosophy, from Newton onward, were 
deeply religious, although Darwin lost much, if not all, of his reli-
gious belief later in life. But remember that during much of this pe-
riod there were primarily two sources of education and wealth: the 
Church and the Crown. The Church was the National Science Foun-
dation of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. All in-
stitutions of higher learning were tied to various denominations, and 
it was unthinkable for any educated person to not be affiliated with 
the Church. And as Giordano Bruno and later Galileo discovered, it 
was unpleasant at best to counter its doctrine. It would have been 
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remarkable for any of these leading early scientific thinkers to have 
been anything but religious. 
The religiosity of the early scientific pioneers is also cited today by 
sophists who claim that science and religious doctrine are compatible, 
but who confuse science and scientists. In spite of frequent appearances 
to the contrary, scientists are people. And like all people they are capa-
ble of holding many potentially mutually contradictory notions in their 
head at the same time. No correlation between divergent views held by 
any individual is representative of anything but human foibles. 
To claim that some scientists are or were religious is like saying 
some scientists are Republicans or some are flat-earthers or some are 
creationists. It doesn't imply causality or consistency. My friend Rich-
ard Dawkins has told me of a professor of astrophysics who, during the 
day, writes papers that are published in astronomical journals assuming 
that the universe is more than 13 billion years old, but then goes home 
and privately espouses the literal biblical claim that the universe is six 
thousand years old. 
What determines intellectual consistency or lack thereof in the sci-
ences is a combination of rational arguments with subsequent evidence 
and continued testing. It is perfectly reasonable to claim that religion, 
in the Western world, may be the mother of science. But as any parent 
knows, children rarely grow up to be models of their parents. 
Newton may, following tradition, have been motivated to look at 
light because it was a gift from God. But we remember his work not 
because of his motivation, but because of what he discovered. 
Newton was convinced that light was made of particles, which he re-
ferred to as corpuscles, while Descartes, and later Newton's nemesis Robert 
Hooke, and still later the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens, all claimed 
that light was a wave. One of the key observations that appeared to support 
the wave theory was that white light, such as light from the Sun, could split 
into all the colors of the rainbow when passed through a prism. 
As was often the case during his life, Newton believed that he was 
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correct and several of his most famous contemporaries (and competi-
tors) were wrong. To demonstrate this, he devised a clever experiment 
using prisms that he first performed while at home in Woolsthorpe, 
to escape the bubonic plague ravaging Cambridge. As he reported at 
the Royal Society in 1672, on the forty-fourth try, he observed precisely 
what he hoped he would see. 
Advocates of the wave theory had argued that light waves were made 
of white light and that the light split into colors when it passed through 
a prism because of "corruption" of the rays as they traversed the glass. In 
this case, the more glass, the more splitting. 
Newton reasoned that this was not the case, but that light is made 
of colored particles that combine together to appear white. (With a nod 
to his occult fascination, Newton classified the colored particles of the 
spectrum-a term he coined—into seven different types: red, orange, 
yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. From the time of the Greeks, the 
number seven had been considered to possess mystical qualities.) To 
demonstrate that the wave/corruption picture was incorrect, Newton 
passed a beam of white light through two prisms held in opposite orien-
tations. The first prism split the light into its spectrum, and the second 
recomposed it back into a single white light beam. This result would 
have been impossible if the glass had corrupted the light. A second 
prism would have simply made the situation worse and would not have 
caused the light to revert back to its original state. 
This result does not in fact disprove the wave theory of light (it actu-
ally supports it, because light slows down as it bends upon entering the 
prism, just as waves would do). But since the advocates of that theory 
had argued (incorrectly) that the spectral splitting was due to corrup-
tion, Newton's demonstration that this was not the case struck a signifi-
cant blow in favor of his particle model. 
Newton went on to discover many other facets of light that we use 
today in our understanding of the wave nature of light. He showed that 
every color of light has a unique bend angle when passing through a 
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glass prism. He also showed that all objects appear to be the same color 
as the color of the light beam illuminating them. And he showed that 
colored light will not change its color no matter how many times it is 
reflected by or passes through a prism. 
All of these results, including his original result, can be explained 
simply if white light is indeed composed of a collection of different col-
ors—that much he got right. But they can't be explained if light is made 
of different-colored particles. Rather, white light is composed of waves 
of many different wavelengths. 
Newton's opponents did not give up easily, even in the face of New-
ton's rising popularity and the death of his chief opponent, Hooke. They 
did not give up even after Newton's election as president of the Royal 
Society in 1703, the year he then actually published his research on light 
in his epic Opticks. Indeed, the debate on the nature of light continued 
to rage on for over a century. 
Part of the problem with a wave picture of light was the question '
hat 
is it that light is a wave of exactly?" And if it is a wave, then since all known 
waves require some medium, what medium does it travel in? These ques-
tions were sufficiently perplexing that practitioners of the wave theory had 
to resurrect a new invisible substance permeating all space, the ether. 
The resolution of this conundrum came, as such resolutions often 
do, from a totally unexpected corner of the physical world, one full of 
sparks, and spinning wheels. 
When I was a young professor at Yale—in the ancient but huge office 
I was lucky enough to commandeer when an equally ancient colleague 
retired—there was left hanging for me a copy of a photograph of Mi-
chael Faraday taken in 186i. I have treasured it ever since. 
I don't believe in hero worship, but if I did, Faraday would be up 
there with the best. Perhaps more than any other scientist of the nine-
teenth century, he is responsible for the technology that powers our cur-
rent civilization. Yet he had little formal education and at age fourteen 
became a bookbinder's apprentice. Later in his career, after achieving 
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world recognition for his scientific contributions, he insisted on keep-
ing to his humble roots, turning down a knighthood and twice turning 
down the presidency of the Royal Society. Later on he refused to advise 
the British government on the production of chemical weapons for use 
in the Crimean War, citing ethical reasons. And for more than thirty-
three years he gave a series of Christmas lectures at the Royal Institu-
tion to excite young people about science. What's not to like? 
Much as one might admire the man, it is the scientist who matters 
here for our story. Faraday's first scientific lesson is one I tell my students: 
always suck up to your professors. At the age of twenty, after completing 
seven years of apprenticeship as a bookbinder, Faraday attended the lec-
tures of the famous chemist Humphry Davy, then the head of the Royal 
Institution. Afterward Faraday presented Davy with a three-hundred-
page, beautifully bound book containing the notes Faraday had taken 
during the lectures. Within a year, Faraday was appointed Davy's sec-
retary and shortly thereafter got an appointment as chemical assistant 
in the Royal Institution. Later on, Faraday learned the same lesson but 
with the opposite result. Following his excitement over some early, quite 
significant experiments that he performed, Faraday accidentally forgot 
to acknowledge work with Davy in his published results. This acciden-
tal snub probably resulted in his being reassigned to other activities by 
Davy and delaying his world-changing research by several years. 
When reassigned, Faraday had been working on the "hot" area of sci-
entific research, the newly discovered connections between electricity 
and magnetism, driven by results of the Danish physicist Hans Christian 
Oersted. These two forces seem quite different, yet have odd similarities. 
Electric charges can attract or repel. So can magnets. Yet magnets always 
seem to have two poles, north and south, which cannot be isolated, while 
electric charges can individually be positive or negative. 
For some time, scientists and natural philosophers had wondered if the 
two forces might have some hidden connection, and the first empirical clue 
came to Oersted by accident In 182o, while delivering a lecture, Oersted 
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saw that a compass needle was deflected when an electric current from 
a battery was switched on. A few months later he followed up on this ob-
servation and discovered that a current of moving electric charges, which 
we now commonly call an electric current, produced a magnetic attraction 
that caused compass needles to point in a circle around the wire. 
He had blazed a new trail. Word spread quickly among scientists, 
through the Continent and across the English Channel. Moving electric 
charges produced a magnetic force. Could there be other connections? 
Could magnets in turn influence electric charges? 
Scientists searched for such a possibility, without success. Davy and an-
other colleague tried to build an electric motor based on the connection 
discovered by Oersted, but failed. Faraday ultimately got a wire with a cur-
rent in it to move around a magnet, which did form a crude sort of motor. It 
was this exciting development that he reported without citing Davy's name. 
Partly this was mere gamesmanship. No new fundamental phenom-
enon was being uncovered. Perhaps this was the rationale for one of my 
favorite (likely apocryphal) stories about Faraday. It is said that William 
Gladstone, later to be British prime minister, heard of Faraday's labora-
tory, full of weird devices, and asked in 289a what the practical value of 
all this study into electricity was. Faraday was purported to have replied, 
"Why, sir, there is every probability that you will soon be able to tax it." 
Apocryphal or not, both great irony and truth are in that witty 
comeback. Curiosity-driven research may seem self-indulgent and far 
from the immediate public good. However, essentially all of our cur-
rent quality of life, for people living in the first world, has arisen from 
the fruits of such research, including all the electric power that drives 
almost every device we use. 
Two years after Davy's death in 2829, and six years after Faraday had 
become director of the laboratory of the Royal Institution, he made the 
discovery that cemented his reputation as perhaps the greatest experi-
mental physicist of the nineteenth century—magnetic induction. Since 
1824, he had tried to see if magnetism could alter the current flowing 
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