James Clerk Maxwell
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James Clerk Maxwell
With the publication of "
Maxwell was the first to derive the
His discoveries helped usher in the era of modern physics, laying the foundation for such fields as special relativity and quantum mechanics. Many physicists regard Maxwell as the 19th-century scientist having the greatest influence on 20th-century physics. His contributions to the science are considered by many to be of the same magnitude as those of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.[11] In the millennium poll—a survey of the 100 most prominent physicists—Maxwell was voted the third greatest physicist of all time, behind only Newton and Einstein.[12] On the centenary of Maxwell's birthday, Einstein described Maxwell's work as the "most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton".[13] Einstein, when he visited the University of Cambridge in 1922, was told by his host that he had done great things because he stood on Newton's shoulders; Einstein replied: "No I don't. I stand on the shoulders of Maxwell."[14] Tom Siegfried described Maxwell as "one of those once-in-a-century geniuses who perceived the physical world with sharper senses than those around him".[15]
Life
Early life, 1831–1839
James Clerk Maxwell was born on 13 June 1831
Maxwell's parents met and married when they were well into their thirties;[23] his mother was nearly 40 when he was born. They had had one earlier child, a daughter named Elizabeth, who died in infancy.[24]
When Maxwell was young his family moved to Glenlair, in Kirkcudbrightshire, which his parents had built on the estate which comprised 1,500 acres (610 ha).[25] All indications suggest that Maxwell had maintained an unquenchable curiosity from an early age.[26] By the age of three, everything that moved, shone, or made a noise drew the question: "what's the go o' that?"[27] In a passage added to a letter from his father to his sister-in-law Jane Cay in 1834, his mother described this innate sense of inquisitiveness:
He is a very happy man, and has improved much since the weather got moderate; he has great work with doors, locks, keys, etc., and "show me how it doos" is never out of his mouth. He also investigates the hidden course of streams and bell-wires, the way the water gets from the pond through the wall....[28]
Education, 1839–1847
Recognising the boy's potential, Maxwell's mother Frances took responsibility for his early education, which in the
Maxwell was sent to the prestigious Edinburgh Academy.[31] He lodged during term times at the house of his aunt Isabella. During this time his passion for drawing was encouraged by his older cousin Jemima.[32] The 10-year-old Maxwell, having been raised in isolation on his father's countryside estate, did not fit in well at school.[33] The first year had been full, obliging him to join the second year with classmates a year his senior.[33] His mannerisms and Galloway accent struck the other boys as rustic. Having arrived on his first day of school wearing a pair of homemade shoes and a tunic, he earned the unkind nickname of "Daftie".[34] He never seemed to resent the epithet, bearing it without complaint for many years.[35] Social isolation at the Academy ended when he met Lewis Campbell and Peter Guthrie Tait, two boys of a similar age who were to become notable scholars later in life. They remained lifelong friends.[17]
Maxwell was fascinated by
Maxwell's interests ranged far beyond the school syllabus and he did not pay particular attention to examination performance.
University of Edinburgh, 1847–1850
Maxwell left the Academy in 1847 at age 16 and began attending classes at the
At age 18, Maxwell contributed two papers for the
University of Cambridge, 1850–1856
In October 1850, already an accomplished mathematician, Maxwell left Scotland for the University of Cambridge. He initially attended Peterhouse, but before the end of his first term transferred to Trinity, where he believed it would be easier to obtain a fellowship.[48] At Trinity he was elected to the elite secret society known as the Cambridge Apostles.[49] Maxwell's intellectual understanding of his Christian faith and of science grew rapidly during his Cambridge years. He joined the "Apostles", an exclusive debating society of the intellectual elite, where through his essays he sought to work out this understanding.
Now my great plan, which was conceived of old, ... is to let nothing be wilfully left unexamined. Nothing is to be holy ground consecrated to Stationary Faith, whether positive or negative. All fallow land is to be ploughed up and a regular system of rotation followed. ... Never hide anything, be it weed or no, nor seem to wish it hidden. ... Again I assert the Right of Trespass on any plot of Holy Ground which any man has set apart. ... Now I am convinced that no one but a Christian can actually purge his land of these holy spots. ... I do not say that no Christians have enclosed places of this sort. Many have a great deal, and every one has some. But there are extensive and important tracts in the territory of the Scoffer, the Pantheist, the Quietist, Formalist, Dogmatist, Sensualist, and the rest, which are openly and solemnly Tabooed. ..."
Christianity—that is, the religion of the Bible—is the only scheme or form of belief which disavows any possessions on such a tenure. Here alone all is free. You may fly to the ends of the world and find no God but the Author of Salvation. You may search the Scriptures and not find a text to stop you in your explorations. ...
The Old Testament and the Mosaic Law and Judaism are commonly supposed to be "Tabooed" by the orthodox. Sceptics pretend to have read them and have found certain witty objections ... which too many of the orthodox unread admit, and shut up the subject as haunted. But a Candle is coming to drive out all Ghosts and Bugbears. Let us follow the light.[50]
In the summer of his third year, Maxwell spent some time at the Suffolk home of the Rev. C. B. Tayler, the uncle of a classmate, G. W. H. Tayler. The love of God shown by the family impressed Maxwell, particularly after he was nursed back from ill health by the minister and his wife.[51]
On his return to Cambridge, Maxwell writes to his recent host a chatty and affectionate letter including the following testimony,[50]
... I have the capacity of being more wicked than any example that man could set me, and ... if I escape, it is only by God's grace helping me to get rid of myself, partially in science, more completely in society, —but not perfectly except by committing myself to God ...
In November 1851, Maxwell studied under
In 1854, Maxwell graduated from Trinity with a degree in mathematics. He scored second highest in the final examination, coming behind Edward Routh and earning himself the title of Second Wrangler. He was later declared equal with Routh in the more exacting ordeal of the Smith's Prize examination.[53] Immediately after earning his degree, Maxwell read his paper "On the Transformation of Surfaces by Bending" to the Cambridge Philosophical Society.[54] This is one of the few purely mathematical papers he had written, demonstrating his growing stature as a mathematician.[55] Maxwell decided to remain at Trinity after graduating and applied for a fellowship, which was a process that he could expect to take a couple of years.[56] Buoyed by his success as a research student, he would be free, apart from some tutoring and examining duties, to pursue scientific interests at his own leisure.[56]
The nature and perception of colour was one such interest which he had begun at the University of Edinburgh while he was a student of Forbes.
Maxwell was made a fellow of Trinity on 10 October 1855, sooner than was the norm,
Marischal College, Aberdeen, 1856–1860
The 25-year-old Maxwell was a good 15 years younger than any other professor at Marischal. He engaged himself with his new responsibilities as head of a department, devising the syllabus and preparing lectures.[62] He committed himself to lecturing 15 hours a week, including a weekly pro bono lecture to the local working men's college.[62] He lived in Aberdeen with his cousin William Dyce Cay, a Scottish civil engineer, during the six months of the academic year and spent the summers at Glenlair, which he had inherited from his father.[20]
He focused his attention on a problem that had eluded scientists for 200 years: the nature of Saturn's rings. It was unknown how they could remain stable without breaking up, drifting away or crashing into Saturn.[63] The problem took on a particular resonance at that time because St John's College, Cambridge, had chosen it as the topic for the 1857 Adams Prize.[64] Maxwell devoted two years to studying the problem, proving that a regular solid ring could not be stable, while a fluid ring would be forced by wave action to break up into blobs. Since neither was observed, he concluded that the rings must be composed of numerous small particles he called "brick-bats", each independently orbiting Saturn.[64] Maxwell was awarded the £130 Adams Prize in 1859 for his essay "On the stability of the motion of Saturn's rings";[65] he was the only entrant to have made enough headway to submit an entry.[66] His work was so detailed and convincing that when George Biddell Airy read it he commented, "It is one of the most remarkable applications of mathematics to physics that I have ever seen."[1] It was considered the final word on the issue until direct observations by the Voyager flybys of the 1980s confirmed Maxwell's prediction that the rings were composed of particles.[67] It is now understood, however, that the rings' particles are not totally stable, being pulled by gravity onto Saturn. The rings are expected to vanish entirely over the next 300 million years.[68]
In 1857 Maxwell befriended the Reverend Daniel Dewar, who was then the Principal of Marischal.[69] Through him Maxwell met Dewar's daughter, Katherine Mary Dewar. They were engaged in February 1858 and married in Aberdeen on 2 June 1858. On the marriage record, Maxwell is listed as Professor of Natural Philosophy in Marischal College, Aberdeen.[70] Katherine was seven years Maxwell's senior. Comparatively little is known of her, although it is known that she helped in his lab and worked on experiments in viscosity.[71] Maxwell's biographer and friend, Lewis Campbell, adopted an uncharacteristic reticence on the subject of Katherine, though describing their married life as "one of unexampled devotion".[72]
In 1860 Marischal College merged with the neighbouring
King's College, London, 1860–1865
Maxwell's time at King's was probably the most productive of his career. He was awarded the
This time is especially noteworthy for the advances Maxwell made in the fields of electricity and magnetism. He examined the nature of both electric and magnetic fields in his two-part paper "
Later years, 1865–1879
In 1865 Maxwell resigned the chair at King's College, London, and returned to Glenlair with Katherine. In his paper "On governors" (1868) he mathematically described the behaviour of governors—devices that control the speed of steam engines—thereby establishing the theoretical basis of control engineering.[79] In his paper "On reciprocal figures, frames and diagrams of forces" (1870) he discussed the rigidity of various designs of lattice.[80][81] He wrote the textbook Theory of Heat (1871) and the treatise Matter and Motion (1876). Maxwell was also the first to make explicit use of dimensional analysis, in 1871.[82]
In 1871 he returned to Cambridge to become the first Cavendish Professor of Physics.[83] Maxwell was put in charge of the development of the Cavendish Laboratory, supervising every step in the progress of the building and of the purchase of the collection of apparatus.[84] One of Maxwell's last great contributions to science was the editing (with copious original notes) of the research of Henry Cavendish, from which it appeared that Cavendish researched, amongst other things, such questions as the density of the Earth and the composition of water.[85] He was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1876.[86]
In April 1879 Maxwell began to have difficulty in swallowing, the first symptom of his fatal illness.[87]
Maxwell died in Cambridge of abdominal cancer on 5 November 1879 at the age of 48.[40] His mother had died at the same age of the same type of cancer.[88] The minister who regularly visited him in his last weeks was astonished at his lucidity and the immense power and scope of his memory, but comments more particularly,
... his illness drew out the whole heart and soul and spirit of the man: his firm and undoubting faith in the Incarnation and all its results; in the full sufficiency of the Atonement; in the work of the Holy Spirit. He had gauged and fathomed all the schemes and systems of philosophy, and had found them utterly empty and unsatisfying—"unworkable" was his own word about them—and he turned with simple faith to the Gospel of the Saviour.
As death approached Maxwell told a Cambridge colleague,[50]
I have been thinking how very gently I have always been dealt with. I have never had a violent shove all my life. The only desire which I can have is like David to serve my own generation by the will of God, and then fall asleep.
Maxwell is buried at Parton Kirk, near Castle Douglas in Galloway close to where he grew up.[89] The extended biography The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, by his former schoolfellow and lifelong friend Professor Lewis Campbell, was published in 1882.[90][91] His collected works were issued in two volumes by the Cambridge University Press in 1890.[92]
The executors of Maxwell's estate were his physician
There is a memorial inscription to him near the choir screen at Westminster Abbey.[94]
Personal life
As a great lover of
Gin a body meet a body
Flyin' through the air.
Gin a body hit a body,
Will it fly? And where?
A collection of his poems was published by his friend Lewis Campbell in 1882.[97]
Descriptions of Maxwell remark upon his remarkable intellectual qualities being matched by social awkwardness.[98]
Maxwell wrote the following aphorism for his own conduct as a scientist:
He that would enjoy life and act with freedom must have the work of the day continually before his eyes. Not yesterday's work, lest he fall into despair, not to-morrow's, lest he become a visionary not that which ends with the day, which is a worldly work, nor yet that only which remains to eternity, for by it he cannot shape his action. Happy is the man who can recognize in the work of to-day a connected portion of the work of life, and an embodiment of the work of eternity. The foundations of his confidence are unchangeable, for he has been made a partaker of Infinity. He strenuously works out his daily enterprises, because the present is given him for a possession.[99]
Maxwell was an evangelical
Scientific legacy
Electromagnetism
Maxwell had studied and commented on electricity and magnetism as early as 1855 when his paper "On Faraday's lines of force" was read to the Cambridge Philosophical Society.[105] The paper presented a simplified model of Faraday's work and how electricity and magnetism are related. He reduced all of the current knowledge into a linked set of differential equations with 20 equations in 20 variables. This work was later published as "On Physical Lines of Force" in March 1861.[106]
Around 1862, while lecturing at King's College, Maxwell calculated that the speed of propagation of an electromagnetic field is approximately that of the speed of light. He considered this to be more than just a coincidence, commenting, "We can scarcely avoid the conclusion that light consists in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena.[1]
Working on the problem further, Maxwell showed that the equations predict the existence of waves of oscillating electric and magnetic fields that travel through empty space at a speed that could be predicted from simple electrical experiments; using the data available at the time, Maxwell obtained a velocity of 310,740,000 metres per second (1.0195×109 ft/s).[107] In his 1865 paper "A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field", Maxwell wrote, "The agreement of the results seems to show that light and magnetism are affections of the same substance, and that light is an electromagnetic disturbance propagated through the field according to electromagnetic laws".[4]
His famous twenty equations, in their modern form of partial differential equations, first appeared in fully developed form in his textbook A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in 1873.[108] Most of this work was done by Maxwell at Glenlair during the period between holding his London post and his taking up the Cavendish chair.[1] Oliver Heaviside reduced the complexity of Maxwell's theory down to four partial differential equations,[109] known now collectively as Maxwell's Laws or Maxwell's equations. Although potentials became much less popular in the nineteenth century,[110] the use of scalar and vector potentials is now standard in the solution of Maxwell's equations.[111]
As Barrett and Grimes (1995) describe:[112]
Maxwell expressed electromagnetism in the algebra of
quaternionsif the theory was purely local, and vector analysis became commonplace.
Maxwell was proved correct, and his quantitative connection between light and electromagnetism is considered one of the great accomplishments of 19th-century mathematical physics.[113]
Maxwell also introduced the concept of the electromagnetic field in comparison to force lines that Faraday described.[114] By understanding the propagation of electromagnetism as a field emitted by active particles, Maxwell could advance his work on light. At that time, Maxwell believed that the propagation of light required a medium for the waves, dubbed the luminiferous aether.[114] Over time, the existence of such a medium, permeating all space and yet apparently undetectable by mechanical means, proved impossible to reconcile with experiments such as the Michelson–Morley experiment.[115] Moreover, it seemed to require an absolute frame of reference in which the equations were valid, with the distasteful result that the equations changed form for a moving observer. These difficulties inspired Albert Einstein to formulate the theory of special relativity; in the process Einstein dispensed with the requirement of a stationary luminiferous aether.[116]
Colour vision
Along with most physicists of the time, Maxwell had a strong interest in psychology. Following in the steps of
Maxwell was also interested in applying his theory of colour perception, namely in
During an 1861 Royal Institution lecture on colour theory, Maxwell presented the world's first demonstration of colour photography by this principle of three-colour analysis and synthesis. Thomas Sutton, inventor of the single-lens reflex camera, took the picture. He photographed a tartan ribbon three times, through red, green, and blue filters, also making a fourth photograph through a yellow filter, which, according to Maxwell's account, was not used in the demonstration. Because Sutton's photographic plates were insensitive to red and barely sensitive to green, the results of this pioneering experiment were far from perfect. It was remarked in the published account of the lecture that "if the red and green images had been as fully photographed as the blue", it "would have been a truly-coloured image of the riband. By finding photographic materials more sensitive to the less refrangible rays, the representation of the colours of objects might be greatly improved."[76][122][123] Researchers in 1961 concluded that the seemingly impossible partial success of the red-filtered exposure was due to ultraviolet light, which is strongly reflected by some red dyes, not entirely blocked by the red filter used, and within the range of sensitivity of the wet collodion process Sutton employed.[124]
Kinetic theory and thermodynamics
Maxwell also investigated the kinetic theory of gases. Originating with Daniel Bernoulli, this theory was advanced by the successive labours of John Herapath, John James Waterston, James Joule, and particularly Rudolf Clausius, to such an extent as to put its general accuracy beyond a doubt; but it received enormous development from Maxwell, who in this field appeared as an experimenter (on the laws of gaseous friction) as well as a mathematician.[125]
Between 1859 and 1866, he developed the theory of the distributions of velocities in particles of a gas, work later generalised by Ludwig Boltzmann.[126][127] The formula, called the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution, gives the fraction of gas molecules moving at a specified velocity at any given temperature. In the kinetic theory, temperatures and heat involve only molecular movement. This approach generalised the previously established laws of thermodynamics and explained existing observations and experiments in a better way than had been achieved previously. His work on thermodynamics led him to devise the thought experiment that came to be known as Maxwell's demon, where the second law of thermodynamics is violated by an imaginary being capable of sorting particles by energy.[128]
In 1871, he established
Control theory
Maxwell published the paper "On governors" in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, vol. 16 (1867–1868).[131] This paper is considered a central paper of the early days of control theory.[132] Here "governors" refers to the governor or the centrifugal governor used to regulate steam engines.
Honours
Publications
- Maxwell, James Clerk (1873), A treatise on electricity and magnetism Vol I, Oxford : Clarendon Press
- Maxwell, James Clerk (1873), A treatise on electricity and magnetism Vol II, Oxford : Clarendon Press
- Maxwell, James Clerk (1876), Matter and Motion, London and New York: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and Pott, Young & Co.
- Maxwell, James Clerk (1881), An Elementary treatise on electricity, Oxford : Clarendon Press
- Maxwell, James Clerk (1890), The scientific papers of James Clerk Maxwell Vol I, Dover Publication
- Maxwell, James Clerk (1890), The scientific papers of James Clerk Maxwell Vol II, Cambridge, University Press
- Maxwell, James Clerk (1908), Theory of heat, Longmans Green Co.[133]
- Three of Maxwell's contributions to Encyclopædia Britannica appeared in the Ninth Edition (1878): Atom,[134] Attraction,[135] and Ether;[136] and three in the Eleventh Edition (1911): Capillary Action,[137] Diagram,[138] and Faraday, Michael[139]
Notes
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- ^ Newton, Isaac (1704). Opticks: or a treatise of the reflexions, refractions, inflexions and colours of light. London: Printed for Sam. Smith, and Benj. Walford, Printers to the Royal Society, at the Prince's Arms in St. Paul's Church-yard. Archived from the original on 24 December 2015.
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- from the original on 1 August 2020. Retrieved 10 March 2020. (This thought-experiment is described on pages 283–284. The short-wavelength filter is specified as "violet", but during the 19th century "violet" could be used to describe a deep violet-blue such as the colour of cobalt glass.)
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- ^ Maxwell, J. Clerk (1861). "The Theory of the Primary Colours". The British Journal of Photography. Archived from the original on 12 June 2013. Retrieved 28 March 2013.
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- ^ "Archives Biographies: James Clerk Maxwell". The Institution of Engineering and Technology. Archived from the original on 27 June 2013. Retrieved 1 July 2013.
- ^ Hill, Melanie. "The Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution" (PDF). Georgia Institute of Technology. Archived (PDF) from the original on 3 January 2014. Retrieved 28 August 2013.
- ISBN 978-0-08-045904-2. Archivedfrom the original on 12 May 2016.
- from the original on 19 August 2017. Retrieved 5 August 2017.
- from the original on 19 April 2021. Retrieved 1 July 2013.
- ISBN 978-0-19-517324-6. Archivedfrom the original on 3 December 2016.
- JSTOR 112510.
- S2CID 144250314.
- ISBN 978-0-486-41735-6. Archivedfrom the original on 6 June 2020. Retrieved 5 September 2020.
- ^ Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. III (9th ed.). 1878. p. 36. .
- ^ Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. III (9th ed.). 1878. p. 63. .
- ^ Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. VIII (9th ed.). 1878. .
- ^ Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 05 (11th ed.). 1911. .
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References
- Barrett, Terence William; Grimes, Dale Mills (1995). Advanced Electromagnetism: Foundations, Theory and Applications. World Scientific. ISBN 978-981-02-2095-2.
- ISBN 978-3-319-18515-6. Retrieved 8 July 2015.
- Campbell, Lewis; Garnett, William (1882). The Life of James Clerk Maxwell (PDF). Edinburgh: MacMillan. OCLC 2472869.
- Eyges, Leonard (1972). The Classical Electromagnetic Field. New York: Dover. ISBN 9780486639475.
- ISBN 978-0-387-25827-0.
- OCLC 811951455.
- Harman, Peter M. (1998). The Natural Philosophy of James Clerk Maxwell. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-00585-X.
- Harman, Peter M. (2004). "Maxwell, James". doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/5624. (Subscription or UK public library membershiprequired.)
- Mahon, Basil (2003). The Man Who Changed Everything – the Life of James Clerk Maxwell. Wiley. ISBN 0-470-86171-1.
- Russo, Remigio (1996). Mathematical Problems in Elasticity. World Scientific. ISBN 981-02-2576-8.
- Tait, Peter Guthrie (1911). Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 17 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. . In
- ISBN 978-0-486-61187-7.
- Tolstoy, Ivan (1982). James Clerk Maxwell: A Biography. University of Chicago Press. OCLC 8688302.
- Warwick, Andrew (2003). Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-87374-9.
- Waterston, Charles D; Macmillan Shearer, A. (July 2006). Former Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1783–2002: Biographical Index (PDF). Vol. II. Edinburgh: ISBN 978-0-902198-84-5.
- ISBN 978-0-7181-9946-3.
External links
- Portraits of James Clerk Maxwell at the National Portrait Gallery, London
- Works by James Clerk Maxwell at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about James Clerk Maxwell at Internet Archive
- Works by James Clerk Maxwell at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "James Clerk Maxwell", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
- "Genealogy and Coat of Arms of James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879)". Numericana.
- "The James Clerk Maxwell Foundation".
- "Maxwell, James Clerk (Maxwell's last will and testament)". scotlandspeople.gov.uk. 31 May 2013. Archived from the original on 30 December 2006. Retrieved 25 November 2008.
- "The Published Scientific Papers and Books of James Clerk Maxwell" (PDF). Clerk Maxwell Foundation.
- "Bibliography" (PDF). Clerk Maxwell Foundation.
- James Clerk Maxwell, "Experiments on colour as perceived by the Eye, with remarks on colour-blindness". Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. 3, no. 45, pp. 299–301. (digital facsimile from the Linda Hall Library)
- Maxwell, BBC Radio 4 discussion with Simon Schaffer, Peter Harman & Joanna Haigh (In Our Time, 2 October 2003)
- Scotland's Einstein: James Clerk Maxwell – The Man Who Changed the World, BBC Two documentary 2015.