[zyklu5]

Thank you very much for the link.

This letter from Maxwell to Faraday: https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/faraday/letters/Faraday3354 is very surprising to me. Already they are thinking of gravity in field theoretic terms. Just to set context: Riemann's Habilitationsschrift was just 3 years earlier but not to be published till late 1860s.

[rramadass]

Faraday actually did some experiments to try and show that Electricity and Gravity were related and in 1851 published On the possible relation of Gravity to Electricity in "Philosophical Transactions" of the Royal Society!

This article gives the details; Michael Faraday, grand unified theorist? (1851) - https://skullsinthestars.com/2009/03/06/michael-faraday-gran...

His ability to conceptualize/intuit and devise theories/experiments-to-test-theories was unparalleled. Maxwell could not have come up with his formal mathematical equations if he did not have Faraday's conceptual work on which to build upon. It goes to show that concepts/intuition must always go ahead of formalization.