HERITAGE


Magnetic personality


Quirky aristocrat James Clerk Maxwell was a genius physicist who changed the world forever, and whose legacy ranks alongside Albert Einstein and Sir Isaac Newton


WORDS PROFESSOR DAVID PURDIE W


hen Albert Einstein, perhaps the most famous physicist of all time, published his special theory of relativity in 1905,


he used the opening sentence to mention one of Scotland’s greatest scientific minds – James Clerk Maxwell. Later, when marking the cente- nary of Maxwell’s birth, Einstein wrote: ‘The theory of relativity owes its origins to Maxwell’s equations of the electro-magnetic field. This change in the conception of reality is the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton.’ High praise indeed, and Einstein wasn’t


alone in singing about Maxwell’s achieve- ments. In a poll carried out among the Institute of Physics’ 50,000 members in 1999, Maxwell finished third, behind only Einstein himself and Sir Isaac Newton. The Scot ranked above Italian scholar Galileo Galilei and quantum physics legends Niels Bohr, Paul Dirac and Erwin Schrodinger. He may have also taken the first permanent


colour photograph, produced ground-breaking work on colour blindness, and laid the founda-


70 WWW.SCOTTISHFIELD.CO.UK


Above: A young James Clerk Maxwell. Right: A painting of James Clerk Maxwell and his wife, Katherine Mary Clerk Maxwell, née Dewar, by Jemima Blackburn.


tions for radar and many of today’s electronic gadgets, but Maxwell’s greatest achievement was to bring together the theories that described electricity and magnetism into a single set of equations. They changed the way physicists understood and described the world. As Professor Richard Feynman, the Ameri-


can Nobel Prize-winning physicist, put it: ‘Seen from, say, 10,000 years from now, there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century was Maxwell’s discovery of the laws of electro-dynamics.’ Genius comes in two forms. First, there is


the regulation genius, of which there are several per generation, who make major advances in their disciplines, leaving their field more orderly than before. Then, perhaps only once each century, there comes a magician; a person whose vision perceives the field to be actually chaotic – and whose genius is to see a higher order within that chaos, elevating the field to a completely new level of understanding. From an early age, Maxwell’s teachers knew he was a prodigy. He was born in Edinburgh in


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