“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 linked electricity, magnetism, and optics.
As if this achievement were not enough, his kinetic theory of gases accurately explained the origin of temperature.
He introduced probability into the physics of the very small, laying the foundation for quantum theory.
He was the first person ever to produce a color photograph; and he used mathematics to explain Saturn’s rings over 100 years before the Voyager spacecraft confirmed that he was absolutely right.
In addition to his great discoveries, in his personal life, he was known for his capacity for hard work, his friendliness, personal kindness and generosity.
Maxwell’s School Life
James Clerk Maxwell was born into a wealthy family in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK on June 13, 1831. His father was a lawyer, and his mother died when he was only eight years old.
He attended high school in Edinburgh – Edinburgh Academy – where he published his first academic paper, Oval Curves at the age of just 14. By this age, he had also completely memorized the Bible. Maxwell was an evangelical Protestant, who believed his religion was a private affair. Like Isaac Newton, he saw no disagreements between his science and his religion.
Unable to properly understand the genius in their class, some of the boys at school gave Maxwell the name ‘Dafty.’
Maxwell’s school classes had as many 60 children in them. One of his classmates, W. Macfarlane later said of him:
Clerk Maxwell, when he entered the Academy, was somewhat rustic and somewhat eccentric. Boys called him ‘Dafty,’ and used to try to make fun of him. On one occasion I remember he turned with tremendous vigour, with a kind of demonic force, on his tormentors. I think he was let alone after that, and gradually won the respect even of the most thoughtless of his schoolfellows.
Maxwell made firm friends with Lewis Campbell, who went on to became a professor of Greek at the University of St Andrews and Peter Guthrie Tait, who became a professor of physics at the University of Edinburgh.
Maxwell at University – A Student, then Professor
Aged 16, Maxwell entered Edinburgh University for three years, taking courses in physics (it was then called natural philosophy), mathematics, and philosophy. He found the courses rather easy, leaving plenty of free time for his own private scientific research. Maxwell continued to publish serious scientific papers while studying for his degree.
Aged 19, he moved to Cambridge University, studying mathematics, becoming a Fellow of Trinity College when he was 24, sharing the Smith’s Prize for theoretical physics and mathematics with Edward Routh.
In 1856, aged 25, he was awarded Edinburgh’s highest prize in mathematics, the Straiton Gold Medal, and in the same year, he was appointed to the Chair of Natural Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, where he stayed for four years.
During this time he formulated and published his brilliant analysis of how Saturn’s rings could be stable for a long time. Britain’s top astronomer of the time, the Astronomer Royal, Sir George Biddell Airy said of the work:
It is one of the most remarkable applications of mathematics to physics that I have ever seen.
Saturn, with its large number of narrow rings shown in detail. In 1859, Maxwell predicted that Saturn’s rings would be made of a huge number of independently orbiting particles which, if they were to be stable long-term, would to have be arranged in a series of narrow rings. In 1980, his prediction was confirmed by images sent back by Voyager 2. Images by NASA.
While at Aberdeen, he gave a weekly free lecture at a working men’s college. He also married Katherine Mary Dewar, the daughter of the university’s principal. Maxwell lost his job at Aberdeen when a merger of university colleges left him redundant.
In 1860, aged 29, he took a professorship at King’s College, London. He also established that each molecule of air at room temperature collides 8 billion times a second with other molecules on average.
Maxwell stayed in London until 1865, carrying out much of his most notable work.
He then returned to his family home in Scotland for six years devoted to experiments, calculations, and writing. In 1866 he wrote:
I have now my time fully occupied with experiments and speculations of a physical kind, which I could not undertake as long as I had public duties.
During this time he wrote much of the groundbreaking Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, which was published in 1873.
In 1871, he became Cavendish Professor at the University of Cambridge, where he remained until his death in 1879, aged just 48.
More Discoveries
Color in the Human Eye and Photography
A 24 year old James Clerk Maxwell, photographed with one of his color wheels in 1855 when he presented his work Experiments on Colour to the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Experimenting with spinning color wheels, Maxwell deduced that the light receptors in the human eye are capable of seeing just three colors of light.
Later he reasoned that he could make use of his deduction to make a colored photograph – of tartan. He had photographs taken of tartan, first through a red light filter, then a green filter, then a blue filter.
The result of projecting the three images simultaneously on to a screen was a color image of the tartan cloth – the world’s first color photo, in 1861.
Part of the first color image ever produced by photography. A smaller black and white version is shown for comparison.
Maxwell’s Lifetime in Context
Maxwell’s lifetime and the lifetimes of scientists and mathematicians working with electricity and electromagnetism.
Electromagnetism – The First Unification of Nature’s Forces
Maxwell’s work in electromagnetism was inspired by his analysis of work from people like André-Marie Ampère, Hans Christian Oersted, and, especially, Michael Faraday.
Maxwell used mathematics to investigate the fundamental causes of electrical and magnetic behavior, producing what are, to professional physicists, some of the most beautiful equations they use – Maxwell’s Equations. These equations usually aren’t taught until later years in university physics or applied mathematics courses.
Maxwell showed that there must be electromagnetic waves whose speed he calculated would be identical to the speed of light, which people already knew from experiments. Maxwell realized that light must be an electromagnetic wave.
He also pointed out that infrared and other, as yet undiscovered electromagnetic rays, would travel at the speed of light. We now know that indeed there are other rays, such as radio waves, microwaves, UV rays, and x-rays, and they all do travel at the speed of light.
Hard to Understand, they are the Key to our Modern World
Although we now recognize the genius, and indeed beauty of Maxwell’s work, it was controversial when he first published it in 1864. Not many people realized that Maxwell’s Equations accurately and completely described electromagnetism.
Maxwell’s Equations presented in vector calculus form
In 1887, eight years after Maxwell’s death, Heinrich Hertz finally demonstrated by experiment that there truly are electromagnetic waves, which behave in exactly the way Maxwell predicted.
By 1901, Guglielmo Marconi was transmitting radio waves – the lowest energy form of electromagnetic waves – across the Atlantic Ocean, from Britain to Canada. The era of modern, wireless telecommunications had begun.
The Kinetic Theory of Gases and Statistical Physics – the end of Newton’s Physics
In his kinetic theory of gases, Maxwell established that the temperature of a gas is entirely dependent on the speed of its individual atoms or molecules.
He realized that gas particles would not all move at the same speed, because collisions between them would speed some up and slow some down. Maxwell showed that particles in a gas would have a distribution of different speeds and what the distribution would be.
Maxwell-Boltzmann distributions of gas speeds at three different temperatures. At higher temperatures, gas particles move with higher average velocities
From this work, he showed that the Second Law of Thermodynamics – the law that heat always flows from higher temperature objects to lower temperature objects – is a statistical law, based on the behavior of huge numbers of particles. Although some individual particles might disobey the law, the majority obey the law. It is even possible the law could be broken on a larger scale, but the likelihood of this happening is vanishingly small.
A Drop in the Ocean
Maxwell likened the chances of one of these statistical laws being broken on a large scale to the chances of pouring a glass of water into the ocean, then later dipping the glass into the ocean and finding that it filled up with exactly the same molecules you had poured in earlier.
Using the distribution of behaviors of gas molecules, Maxwell developed statistical physics. His methods, and those further developed by Willard Gibbs, were the keystones of the following century’s quantum physics, where no longer could we be absolutely sure about the behavior of small particles – we could only look at the probability of their behaving in a particular way.
Maxwell helped move physics away from the classical, mechanical world view of Newton towards the quantum, probabilistic view that we rely on today – a view Albert Einstein was never happy with, claiming famously that ‘God does not play dice with the Universe.’
An Early Demise
Sadly, James Clerk Maxwell did not enjoy a long life. He died of abdominal cancer in 1879 at the age of just 48. Strangely, his mother had died at the same age from the same disease. He was survived by his wife, Katherine.
With Maxwell’s passing, the world lost one of its greatest minds.
Talking About Maxwell – Quotes
“From a long view of the history of mankind – seen from, say, ten thousand years from now – there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell’s discovery of the laws of electrodynamics.”
“Maxwell is the physicist’s physicist.”
“It was humiliating, to be asked so many questions one couldn’t answer by a child.”
“From the outset Maxwell’s theory excelled all others in elegance and in the abundance of the relations between the various phenomena which it included.”
“The special theory of relativity owes its origins to Maxwell’s equations of the electromagnetic field.”
“He achieved greatness unequaled.”
“The equations were to represent Nature, and Nature is, Maxwell believed, beautiful and elegant… This essentially aesthetic judgement by a nerdish physicist, entirely unknown except to a few other academic scientists, has done more to shape our civilization than any ten recent presidents and prime ministers.”
“The discovery of electrical waves… has had a profound influence on civilization; it has been instrumental in providing the methods which may bring all inhabitants of the world within hearing distance of each other and has potentialities social, educational and political which we are only beginning to realize.”
“When he crossed the bridge from Astronomy to Physics he left behind him for ever the prospect of becoming a great astronomer – but only to become the greatest mathematical physicist the world has seen since Newton.”
Author of this page: The Doc
Images of James Clerk Maxwell enhanced and colorized by this website.
© All rights reserved.
Cite this Page
Please use the following MLA compliant citation:
"James Clerk Maxwell." Famous Scientists. famousscientists.org. 01 Jul. 2014. Web. <www.famousscientists.org/james-clerk-maxwell/>.
Published by FamousScientists.org