inkbluesky

Cape Hatteras sand dune larger. I used to visit here quite a bit. Like many beautiful places people loved it so much that they suburbanized it, put up too many houses and those eye sores commonly known as stripe malls. Still it is worth a stop for anyone traveling down the east coast. The Wright Brothers Museum is nearby.

In chemistry I did very well. In biology even more so, but physics and I used to have mental wrestles. Still between what I tried hard to digest in school and the occassional PBS program I never lost my admiration for physics and those that make it a life long study and make such tremendous contributions to understanding the universe. I remember the name being mentioned, but I didn’t realize what a giant that James Maxwell was. So much so that apparently Einstein stood on his shoulders when it came to relativity theory, James Clerk Maxwell: a force for physics

Had he not died so young, Maxwell would almost certainly have developed special relativity a decade or more before Einstein. Moreover, it was through reading Maxwell’s article “Ether” in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that Albert Michelson came to invent the interferometer – a new kind of instrument that he and Edward Morley used in 1887 to discover that the speed of light is the same in all directions.

So what impression of Maxwell would you have gained if you had met him in his prime, as a young Scottish undergraduate Donald MacAlister did in Cambridge in 1877? You would surely have been charmed, but perhaps also surprised to meet – as MacAlister put it – “a thorough old Scotch laird in ways and speech”. As the proprietor of an 1800 acre Scottish estate, Maxwell had all the qualities of the better kind of Victorian country gentleman: cultivated, considerate of his tenants, active in local affairs, and an expert swimmer and horseman too.

Few would have guessed that this “Scotch laird”, so disarmingly old-fashioned even in 1877, was a scientist whose writings remain astonishingly vibrant in 2006 and the greatest mathematical physicist since Newton. In addition to his work on electromagnetism, Maxwell also contributed to eight other scientific spheres: geometrical optics, kinetic theory, thermodynamics, viscoelasticity, bridge structures, control theory, dimensional analysis and the theory of Saturn’s rings. He also worked on colour vision, producing the first ever colour photograph.