Which Direction Feels Right?

At 54 years old, Michael Faraday watched polarized light pass through glass suspended between electromagnetic poles. He activated the magnet. The light twisted. Rotated. Bent. After twenty-three years of intuition, he finally had proof.

Faraday had started as nobody. A bookbinder's apprentice from a poor London family. He had no university education. No mathematical training. No formal credentials. But he entered the scientific establishment anyway, and as he rose through it, making discoveries and earning recognition, he held an unshakeable sense that light and electricity were connected. A knowing that lived beneath rational thought.

For more than two decades, he held this conviction without evidence. Even his fellow scientists dismissed the idea because they had no measurements to support it, or equations to prove it, or instruments sensitive enough to detect such a connection. Logic said it didn't exist. But Faraday trusted what he sensed.