One scientific epoch ended and another began with James Clerk Maxwell.” Don’t believe me? Well, I wasn’t the first person to say it – Albert Einstein said it first. When Einstein was asked if he had stood on the shoulders of Newton, he replied: “No, I stand on Maxwell’s shoulders.” And Richard Feynman, another of the 20th century’s greatest physicists said: “…the great transformations of ideas come very infrequently… we might think of Newton’s discovery of the laws of mechanics and gravitation, Maxwell’s theory of electricity and magnetism, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and… the theory of quantum mechanics.” James Clerk Maxwell is one of the giants of physics. Unfortunately, his work is less famous than that of the other greats – possibly because his crowning glory – Maxwell’s Equations – are so hard to understand. In producing these equations, he was the first scientist ever to unify any of nature’s fundamental forces. He discovered that electricity and magnetism are actually, at the deepest level, the same force – the electromagnetic force. In doing so, Maxwell proved that light is an electromagnetic wave, and so made a link between electricity, magnetism and optics.
Posted on: Sat, 02 Aug 2014 14:17:48 +0000
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