James Clerk Maxwell
Physicist · 1831-1879 · Physics, stage 3: Meet the physicists
Wrote the equations that unified electricity, magnetism, and light.
Overview
James Clerk Maxwell worked in Aberdeen, London, and Cambridge, where he founded the Cavendish Laboratory. Between 1855 and 1873 he translated Faraday's lines of force into mathematics and arrived at a set of equations describing the electric and magnetic fields together. The equations implied that a disturbance in the fields propagates as a wave, and that its speed, computed from quantities measured in laboratory experiments on electricity, matched the known speed of light. He concluded that light is an electromagnetic wave, a unification on the scale of Newton's. He also did foundational work in statistical physics, deriving the distribution of molecular speeds in a gas, and produced the first colour photograph. Read about the field concept before attempting A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, which is long and demanding.
Where to start reading
On Faraday's Lines of Force 1856
His first paper on electromagnetism, giving Faraday's lines of force a mathematical treatment by analogy with the flow of an incompressible fluid.
A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field 1865
The paper containing the field equations and the argument that light is an electromagnetic wave, based on the agreement between the computed wave speed and the measured speed of light.
A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism 1873
The full statement of the theory in two volumes, which became the standard reference and the text from which the next generation learned the subject.
Part of
Sources
- James Clerk Maxwell English Wikipedia
- James Clerk Maxwell Britannica
- Maxwell's equations English Wikipedia
