Who is the most underrated scientist in history?

Towards the end of his life, the British physicist Oliver Heaviside (1850-1925), became a hermit, a lonely and bitter old man who counted, among his eccentricities, to paint his nails a resplendent pink color. He used to sign his documents as W.O.R.M., because people say that this was what he saw in every human being, a worm. His neighbors said that he replaced his furniture with granite blocks and that little by little he was cornered in the darkness of his house. By then his great work was already in the past, a vast contribution to science that made him one of the greatest scientists in history, and at the same time, one of the most underestimated.

In his youth, Heaviside worked as a telegrapher. Without formal higher education, he fell in love with the great treatise of James Clerk Maxwell, on electromagnetism, and did not rest for years until he mastered its content. Self-taught, then he tossed it aside and started innovating on his own. He quickly achieved high caliber advances. Thus, he reduced the 12 equations of the great Maxwell to a system of 4, achieving a profound simplification that would open the way for other scientists. His particular methods, as Isaac Asimov tells us, pushed him to use his own notation, and allowed him to extend the use of vectors in physics to simplify calculations. This innovation alone would have been enough to occupy a place of importance in science.

But their achievements go much further. Heaviside pioneered the use of Fourier analysis in physics, as well as the use of complex numbers in the study of electric and magnetic fields; introduced, independently, the famous Poynting vector, which defines the flow of energy in electromagnetism. He also predicted, before its discovery, the existence of the ionosphere and was a precursor to aspects of special relativity, such as the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction.

In his studies on electromagnetic radiation he predicted what is now known as Cherenkov radiation, on behalf of the Russian physicist who detected it experimentally, and for what he received in Nobel Prize in 1958. Also, Heaviside developed the correct formula for strength that acts on a moving charge in a magnetic field, today known as the Lorentz formula. In mathematics he developed the operational calculus to solve differential equations, achievement defined as one of the three greatest mathematical advances of the 19th century.

He introduced the important step function, which has wide applications in various branches of the exact sciences. The great physicist also coined terms that are commonly used in electromagnetic theory and technique, terms that sometimes we forget that someone must have invented them. Thus, words such as permeability, inductance, reluctance, conductance, admittance, permitivity, susceptance, impedance and elastanceare his authorship.

Heaviside also wrote one of the first essays that try to explain gravity in terms of electromagnetism, aspects that Einstein explored in his "failed" unified field theory. In fact, in a work published in 1893, the British physicist, with clear vision, risks a speculation, now demonstrated, about the speed of propagation of gravitational interaction:

If variations of the force of the size considered above are too small to lead to observable perturbations of motion, then the striking conclusion is that the speed of gravity may even be the same as that of light…

Despite his great contributions, which opened the doors to spectacular advances in telecommunications, Heaviside died poor, confined in a nursing home and forgotten. However, little by little his achievements are being recognized and we are sure that sooner or later he will take his rightful place in the history of science.

REFERENCES

1. Isaac Asimov, Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. Doubleday and Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1985.