Transcript James Clerk Maxwell 1831 – 1879 BSHM Gresham Lecture 31 October 2012

James Clerk Maxwell
1831 – 1879
BSHM Gresham Lecture 31st October 2012
Raymond Flood
Gresham Professor of Geometry
Key dates in the life of James Clerk Maxwell
DATE
1831
1841 - 1847
1847 - 1850
1850 – 1856
1856 - 1860
1860 - 1865
1865 - 1871
1871 – 1879
EVENT
Born at 14 India Street, Edinburgh
and grew up at Glenlair
Edinburgh Academy
Edinburgh University
Cambridge University
Marischal College, Aberdeen
King’s College, London
Glenlair
Cambridge University
James with his mother,
Frances, in about 1834
James’ father, John,
in about 1850
Edinburgh Academy, 1840
Edinburgh University Library
Stokes theorem: Question 8 in the 1854 Smith’s prize
examination paper in which Maxwell shared first prize
with E.J. Routh
Marischal College, Aberdeen.
Maxwell, Katherine and Toby in 1869
Inaugural lecture, King’s College
1860
“In this class I hope you will learn not merely results, or
formulae applicable to cases that may possibly occur in
our practice afterwards, but the principles on which
those formulae depend, and without which the
formulae are mere mental rubbish. I know the
tendency of the human mind is to do anything rather
than think. But mental labour is not thought, and those
who have with labour acquired the habit of application,
often find it much easier to get up a formula than to
master a principle”
Glenlair, family home of the Maxwells
in about 1884
Newton’s memorial in
Westminster Abbey
James Clerk Maxwell buried
with his parents and wife
in Parton Churchyard
near Glenlair
There is scarcely a single topic that he touched
upon that he did not change almost beyond
recognition
Charles Coulson
• Saturn’s rings
• Colour vision
• Kinetic Theory
• Electromagnetism
Saturn’s rings
Saturn’s rings
Saturn’s rings
Colour Vision
Colour Vision
On the
theory of
compound
colours in
1860
Tartan Ribbon
Kinetic Theory of Gases
Rudolf Clausius
1822 - 1888
If you go at 17 miles per minute and take a
totally new course 1,700,000,000 times a
second, where will you be in an hour
Letter from Maxwell to Tait
Ludwig Boltzmann
1844 - 1906
Electromagnetism
Oersted’s
experiment
Michael Faraday
1791 - 1867
Faraday delivering a Christmas Lecture
at the Royal institution in 1856
Iron filings scattered on
paper over a magnet show
the lines of force
Model of molecular vortices
and electric particles
we can scarcely avoid the inference that light
consists in the transverse undulations of the
same medium which is the cause of electric and
magnetic phenomena
Einstein on Maxwell
Since Maxwell’s time, physical reality has been
thought of as represented by continuous fields,
and not capable of any mechanical
interpretation. This change in the conception of
reality is the most profound and the most
fruitful that physics has experienced since the
time of Newton
Maxwell’s sense of
fun is shown in this
poem to Thomson’s
galvanometer (an
instrument for
measuring current)
Lectures
At the Museum of London
• Ghosts of Departed Quantities: Calculus and its Limits
Tuesday 25 September 2012
• Polynomials and their Roots
Tuesday 6 November 2012
• From One to Many Geometries
Tuesday 11 December 2012
• The Queen of Mathematics
Tuesday 22 January 2013
• Are Averages Typical?
Tuesday 19 February 2013
• Modelling the World
Tuesday 19 March 2013