James Clerk Maxwell

James Clerk Maxwell (Edinburgh, June 13, 1831 – Cambridge, November 5, 1879) was a Scottish physicist best known for his formulation of electromagnetic theory and the statistical theory of gases. He is regarded by most modern physicists as the scientist of the nineteenth century who had the greatest influence on 20th-century physics, and he is ranked with Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and the creators of quantum mechanics Werner Heisenberg, Edwin Schrödinger, and Paul Dirac.

He gave his name to the Maxwell equations, the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, and the unit of magnetic flux, the maxwell.

Biography

Family

James Clerk Maxwell came from two prominent and affluent Scottish families, the Maxwells and the Clerks, both of lower nobility and heavily interrelated. James' father, John, was a younger paternal grandchild of Sir George Clerk, and accordingly was named John Clerk. John added legally the name Maxwell later, after he had inherited the Maxwell's Middlebie estate in the Galloway area (in the South-West of Scotland, 10 km North of Castle Douglas, the market-town, and about 70 km West from the town of Middlebie, in Dumfriesshire).

After marrying Frances Cay in 1826, John Clerk Maxwell and his bride moved from Edinburgh to the Middlebie estate. He and Frances built a country house there, named Glenlair. The house was in a rather isolated spot, even for Scottish standards, far removed from any cities, the closed cities being Glasgow (110 km to the North, a full day's journey at the time) and Edinburgh, which was two whole days of travel.

Early youth

James was born in Edinburgh, where his parents had gone to ensure proper medical attention at his birth. James was the first son of his mother, who had lost previously a daughter of a few months old. Mrs. Clerk Maxwell had the relatively advanced age of forty when she gave birth to James. Soon after the birth the family went back to the Glenlair House. James, who remained an only child, was brought up in the Galloway region, where he played with the local children and acquired a thick Scottish accent, in spite of his upperclass descent. He would never quite lose his accent.

Maxwell's mother died in 1839 from abdominal cancer, the same disease to which Maxwell was to succumb at exactly the same age of forty-eight years. James grew up alone with his father with whom he had a happy and close relationship. At young age James received private lessons from a dull and uninspired tutor, who claimed that James was slow at learning, though in fact he was very inquisitive and had a phenomenal memory. At the age of ten James was sent to the Edinburgh Academy to receive a proper education. During term time, he was living either with his mother's sister Jane Cay, who was unmarried, or with his father's sister Isabella, the widow of James Wedderburn. Both aunts lived in Edinburgh. At the academy he became a life-long friend of Peter Guthrie Tait, who would become a well-known scientist too and one of the advocates of Hamilton's quaternion theory. In the beginning James had a difficult time at school because of his Galloway accent and because he wore strange, but practical, clothes, designed by his father.

At school Maxwell was showing unusual mathematical ability, and at the age of fifteen invented by analogy with the construction of an ellipse a way of drawing ovals using a piece of string. This work was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and although not an important paper, it is remarkable for such a young author.

Student days

At the age of sixteen Maxwell entered Edinburgh University. He was not unusually young to enter a Scottish Unversity. At that time these were hybrids between secondary schools and universities as we now know them. Maxwell studied mathematics, philosophy, and physics and left after three years without graduating to go up to Cambridge, at first to Peterhouse college, which housed many Scotsmen, and after one term to Trinity.

By the time he entered Cambridge University, Maxwell was very knowledgeable about English literature and was himself a reasonably good poet. And, of course, he had a vast knowledge of mathematics and physics. In his first year at Cambridge he had to undertake systematic studies, as any student, although he had already a few papers, one of them a valuable one on elasticity. His tutor, the mathematician Wiliam Hopkins, noted his strong geometrical insight but also that in analysis his powers were somewhat less. Maxwell followed the lectures by Stokes and met William Thomson again, whom he had first met while at Edinburgh University.

In 1854 Maxwell was second wrangler (second place at the competitive exam the "mathematical tripos") and first Smith's prizeman (the Smith's Prize is a prestigious competitive award for an essay that incorporates original research). He was elected to a fellowship at his college, Trinity, and started serious research on two of his favorite topics, color theory and electromagnetism.

The scientist

Color theory

Maxwell started studies on color vision while still at Edinburgh, under guidance of Professor James David Forbes. Fundamental progress on color theory—a subdiscipline of physiological optics—had been made by Thomas Young, who had arrived at the conception of three fundamental colors, red, green, and blue. Maxwell continued Young's investigations by studying color perception with a spinning top that allowed quantitatively measuring of the colors being mixed. Thus, Maxwell contributed importantly in unraveling the mysteries surrounding color vision. As a spin-off he was able to show the first ever color slide, which he projected at the Royal Institution on 17 May 1861. A hundred years later it was found that Maxwell was lucky that his strategy worked, because ultraviolet acted as a proxy for red in the recording stage, a fact that Maxwell was not aware of. In any case, his result greatly impressed his audience.

Twice Maxwell was nominated for a Royal Medal of the Royal Society on the merit of his color work, and twice he was passed. But a nomination in May 1860 by Stokes and William Hallowes Miller (Cambridge professor of mineralogy) for the Rumford Medal was successful.

The work of Young and Maxwell is known now to any computer user who is trying to create his own color scheme.

(To be continued)

External link

Life of James Clerk Maxwell by Lewis Campbell (1882)

References and notes

• I. Tolstoy, James Clerk Maxwell, a biography. Edinburgh: Canongate; 1981.
• B. Mahon, The man who changed everything. Chichester: Wiley; 2003