This week’s episode of ‘Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey’ is less a love letter to science and more a love letter to a scientist, namely Michael Faraday, who the show credits as the creator of modern technological society.

Faraday is a favorite for scientists, from Brian Cox opining that if he could time travel, it would be to witness Faraday speak, to the television series ‘Lost’ naming a character after the man (Daniel Faraday). Yet, as well-loved and respected he is by some of the most famous and influential scientists of our day, his name seems only to be well known by science geeks and science fans.

This episode, which read more like a biopic than a treatise on scientific theory as previous episodes before it, therefore, dedicated itself to getting his name out there.

Where would be, after all, without the man who invented the first electrically powered engine, and set James Clerk Maxwell down the path that would eventually lead to audio and video recording. Faraday saw the invisible, i.e, magnetic waves, and paved a concrete future for humanity that culminates in they way we access and communicate with each other now.

So, while I was initially disappointed that this episode was going to be a biography, I quickly forgot as I followed Faraday’s discoveries, one by one, which led us to how we understand science day.

Good episode.

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