When I took physics they basically said "at first scientists were disturbed by the fact that magnets imply that two objects are interacting without any physical contact, but then Faraday came along and said 'the magnets are actually connected by invisible magnetic field lines' and that resolved everything."
How does saying "but what if there's invisible lines connecting them" resolve anything? To be clear, I'm not objecting to any of the actual electromagnetic laws or using field lines to visualize magnetic fields. It's just that I don't get how invoking invisible lines actually explains anything about how objects are able to react without physical contact.
(Also, it is not lost on me I that this question boils down to "fraking magnets, how do they work?")
Maxwell picked up this idea and ran with it, developing a mathematical theory for the dynamics of the electromagnetic field. Instead of one object somehow magically interacting at a distance, interactions between objects resulted from changes in the electromagnetic field that propagated through space.
The final paragraphs of Maxwell's "Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism" are somewhat relevant.
This is 30-40 years after Faraday first wrote about lines of force, and there still wasn't really consensus about how to explain electromagnetic phenomena.
[emphasis added by me]
> Chapter XXII: Theories of Action at a Distance
> ...
> There appears to be in the minds of these eminent men, some prejudice, or a priori objection, against the hypothesis of a medium in which the phenomena of radiation of light and heat, and the electric actions at a distance take place. It is true that at one time those who speculated as to the causes of physical phenomena, were in the habit of accounting for each kind of action at a distance by means of a special aethereal fluid, whose function and property it was to produce these actions. They filled all space three and four times over with aethers of different kinds, the properties of which were invented merely to 'save appearances,' so that more rational enquirers were willing rather to accept not only Newton's definite law of attraction at a distance, but even the dogma of Cotes, that action at a distance is one of the primary properties of matter, and that no explanation can be more intelligible than this fact. Hence the undulatory theory of light has met with much opposition, directed not against its failure to explain the phenomena, but against its assumption of the existence of a medium in which light is propagated.
> We have seen that the mathematical expressions for electrodynamic action led, in the mind of Gauss, to the conviction that a theory of the propagation of electric action would be found to be the very key-stone of electrodynamics. Now we are unable to conceive of propagation in time, except either as the flight of a material substance through space, or as the propagation of a condition of motion or stress in a medium already existing in space.
> Hence all these theories lead to the conception of a medium in which the propagation takes place, and if we admit this medium as a hypothesis, I think it ought to occupy a prominent place in our investigations, and that we ought to endeavour to construct a mental representation of all the details of its actions, and this has been my constant aim in this treatise.