Sometime in just the last half a century insight, intuition, and inspiration have all become dirty words to science. They've always been dirty words to believers in science but now days there are more and more people who conceptualize science and experiment as belief systems instead of touchstones of reality itself. So of course anything that can't be mathematically expressed is frowned on and if it runs counter to doctrine then it becomes heresy.
It simply wasn't like this back in the 1960's. Generations of people have been formed in the image of Bill Gates. Only logic and math have any meaning at all and then only if they are manipulated by somebody with a doctorate in the relevant field. It never occurs to people any longer that reality is infinitely complex and infinitely interwoven and interdependent,. It never occurs to them that EVERY experiment that has ever been performed is relevant in every single instance and every single observation. It never occurs to them interpretations are dependent on axioms and definitions. It never occurs to them that man can be wholly ignorant of some subjects and this ignorance affects their observations as surely as all experiment and all of reality.
Scientists today are little better. Sure there are still great scientists but they are fewer and farther between. Most think they have all the answers and just don't care about anything outside their usually very highly focused little world. All they care about is the work that has come before and is the cutting edge of tiny little specialties that have no bearing on the big picture.
Much of the problem is really very simple: Scientists must make assumptions to proceed in their specialization and can't really understand anything that isn't inclusive of all of these assumptions. They simply are not even competent to judge something that is outside of the current paradigm. They would have to unlearn half of what they know to even judge it. Suspension of disbelief and stepping outside the box are similar talents and many can do neither. No amount of "empirical evidence" or logic can ever possibly sway them.
You are generalizing.
You are forgetting that people are much complex than you realized, and that’s including scientists, not every scientists think alike, because some use logic and maths more, while others are more focused on experiments and evidence. But the reality of world, reality of nature are not so black-and-white, required the balance between the two extreme ends, a balance with logic/maths and evidence/experiment, to understand nature to the fullest extent.
From what I have read from posts by
@Native, including his OP, Native want people to be like Michael Faraday, who had minimal formal education, with great inventive skills and an experimenter. Hence, experienced and Faraday’s intuitive understanding of electromagnetic fields. Faraday was mostly self-taught.
But as I said, not everyone think alike, and Native cannot expect everyone to learn like Faraday.
James Clerk Maxwell was unremarkable student in school until he was 13. From then on, he excel in maths, he was well ahead of school’s syllabus. He attended university first at 16, at Edinburgh (1847), then Cambridge at 19 (1850, graduated in 1854), became professor at Aberdeen at age 25 in 1856. But it was at King’s College in London, from 1860-1865, that he met Faraday. Most of his work on electromagnetism and light were after 1860, including his Maxwell’s equations.
As you can see formal education did help Maxwell; while his own experiences, his maths were cultivated by the people he met at these universities.
The point being both men were geniuses, and you don’t need to choose who is better, you would accept the teaching of both, as well what being discovered after they were gone.
Like, I said they were both geniuses, however they didn’t know everything, particularly about electrons, and the roles electrons in electromagnetism.
Electrons weren’t discovered until 1897, Joseph John Thomson, with his cathode experiment. And no one knew about protons until it was discovered by Ernest Rutherford in 1920. Rutherford also theorized another baryon particle, neutron, but that wasn’t discovered until 1932, by James Chadwick.
And in 1905, Albert Einstein was responsible for his contribution to light having dual properties, as both wave and particle (he called this particle, “quanta”, but it is known as “photon”), in his paper on Photoelectric Effect.
And no one knew about quarks until the 1960s.
Being geniuses, whether they be self-taught or being formally educated, or whether they are experimenter or mathematician, don’t mean they know everything there is to know.
So there are things that both Faraday and Maxwell didn’t know at the time, that would have made their more complete theory on electromagnetism.
Because there are lot more to learn, and it is way wider than both Faraday and Maxwell knew, it is better to have good grounding on the basic of electromagnetic fields at the university, to learn more than just what Faraday and Maxwell knew, because even these two geniuses weren’t aware of things that weren’t discovered until later.
That’s what Native doesn’t understand, the benefits of having university education.
