Darwin's confession; Faraday's joke

Charles Darwin made a striking confession. Up to the age of thirty, he had loved poetry, pictures and music, and enjoyed Shakespeare greatly.

But later in life, he found Shakespeare so dull that it made him feel sick, and he lost his taste for pictures and music too. His mind, he said, had become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.

Then there is Michael Faraday. His ideas about 'lines of force' in electricity and magnetism were doubted at first, because he was not a trained mathematician. But James Clerk Maxwell saw that Faraday was in fact a great mathematician in his thinking, whose ideas would grow into whole new sciences.

When the politician Gladstone asked Faraday what use electricity was, Faraday is said to have replied: one day, sir, the government will be able to tax it.

Both stories suggest that scientists may lose their wider feelings, and that science is too often valued only for its usefulness.