James Clerk Maxwell JAMES CLERK MAXWELL Perspectives on his Life and Work Edited by raymond flood mark mccartney and andrew whitaker 3 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries c Oxford University Press 2014 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2014 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2013942195 ISBN 978–0–19–966437–5 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. FOREWORD he names of Archimedes, Newton, Einstein and Crick have entered into legend because fragments of their achievements and evidence of their personalities have captured the Tpublic’s imagination. However, another very great scientist, whose fundamental research today pervades all the physical sciences and engineering and enables the technology that makes advances in the life sciences possible, remains virtually unknown outside scientific circles where he is rightly regarded as a giant. According to everyone who knew him, Maxwell was practical, modest, kind and had a strong sense of humour. For him, science was seemingly effortless, a gentleman landowner’s hobby rather than an obsession driven by ambition and riven with rivalry, as was the case with Newton. He was humane and sensitive while possessing extraordinary power and virtuosity in science, and seems to have been devoid of any shred of pomposity. He was very fond of dogs and always had one which he always called Toby. Maxwell was born in Edinburgh, in 1831, to a landed family, and many of his ancestors on both sides were intellectually accomplished, members of the Royal Society, or the Royal Society of Edinburgh, or both. After a precocious childhood on the family estate and university at Edinburgh and Cambridge, and a university position in Aberdeen, where he explained the rings of Saturn in a prize-winning essay and was made redundant, he moved to King’s College, London, in 1860. There followed five anni mirabiles during which he consolidated his work on electromagnetism, founded the theory of statistical mechanics and developed his work on colour vision, producing, in 1861, the first colour photograph (appropriately of a tartan ribbon) at the Royal Institution, where he came into regular contact with Michael Faraday, by then a much older man. While at King’s he was awarded the Royal Society’s 1860 Rumford Medal for his work on colour and elected FRS a year later. However, in 1865 (the year in which he proposed that radiant heat and light are both examples of electromagnetic waves), he resigned his position at King’s to run the family estate while con- tinuing to do research in his own time. There he remained until 1871, when he was prevailed upon to be the first Cavendish Professor in Cambridge. He died there in 1879, aged 48, and was buried in the graveyard of the Old Kirk in Parton, close to the family home. If he had lived as long as Archimedes or Einstein (76) he would have seen Marconi receive transatlantic radio signals, learned of Einstein’s theories of special relativity, of the photoelectric effect and of Brownian motion, on all of which his own work had exerted a profound influence. foreword | v If he had lived as long as Crick (88) he would have seen Einstein’s theory of general relativity and Max Planck win the Nobel Prize for quantum theory. Maxwell was the equal of these great scientists and his early death was a huge loss. How can someone with Maxwell’s presence and achievement be so uncelebrated in his own time and place and later? When the popular historical novelist, Sir Walter Scott, died in 1832, a 61-metre high tower to his memory was erected on Princess Street, Edinburgh in 1846. When Bobby, a dog much-loved for his fidelity, died in 1872, a statue to his memory was unveiled at Greyfriars Churchyard in Edinburgh a year later. Bobby’s legend has survived and his life was made into a Walt Disney film in 1961. Maxwell might have approved. However, when James Clerk Maxwell, arguably the greatest scientist of the nineteenth century, died in 1879, no statue in Edinburgh was erected to his memory for 129 years. Today there is a statue depicting Maxwell, looking down George Street with his back to St. Andrew’s Square, sitting, with Toby loyally at his feet, holding his colour wheel, with his famous equations for the electric and magnetic fields written on the plinth. He might have had misgivings, but one hopes that Maxwell would have been persuaded of the good intentions of his admirers in honouring him for his achievements. That also is the intention of this book. John Toland Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences Cambridge vi | foreword PREFACE ne hundred and fifty years ago, in the autumn of 1863, James Clerk Maxwell was living at 8 Palace Gardens Terrace, Kensington, London, and was professor at King’s College. OIt was the second of three professorial appointments (the first being at Marischal College, Aberdeen, the last at Cambridge). He was 31, a fellow of the Royal Societies of both London and Edinburgh, and had an established reputation within the Victorian scientific community. However, though he could not know it at the time, he was midway through, rather than early on, in his scientific career. By the autumn of 1879, aged 48, he would be dead. It was a relatively brief, but remarkable, life, lived in his beloved rural home of Glenlair, and variously in Edinburgh, Aberdeen, London and Cambridge. His scholarship also ranged wide – covering all the major aspects of Victorian natural philosophy. In scientific terms, his immortality is enshrined in electromagnetism and Maxwell’s equations but, as this book seeks to show, there was much more to Maxwell than electromagnetism, both in terms of his science and his wider life. Indeed, as editors of this book we are of the view that Maxwell’s life and contributions to science are so rich as to demand the expertise of a range of aca- demics – physicists, mathematicians and historians of science and literature – to do him justice. We hope that the various chapters will enable Maxwell to be seen from a range of perspectives. Chapters 1 to 4 deal with wider aspects of his life in time and place, before Chapters 5 to 12 go on to look in more detail at his wide-ranging contributions to science, with concluding chapters on Maxwell’s poetry and Christian faith. Each chapter is self-contained and can be read independ- ently of the others, and though this has inevitably led to some repetition and overlap, we trust that this will not be a burden to the reader. We wish to thank each of the contributors for their chapters, their expertise, and their enthu- siasm for both Maxwell and this book. They have submitted to our editorial requests and queries along the way with good humoured compliance. We also wish to thank the staff at OUP (includ- ing Clare Charles, Keith Mansfield, Caroline McPherson, Victoria Mortimer and Hemalackshmi Niranjan) for their help, advice and patience on the occasionally winding route which this book took from commissioning to final production. Raymond Flood Mark McCartney Andrew Whitaker November, 2013 preface | vii CONTENTS Part I: Life 1. Introduction 3 raymond flood 2. Maxwell at Aberdeen 17 john s. reid 3. Maxwell at King’s College, London 43 john s. reid 4. Cambridge and Building the Cavendish Laboratory 67 isobel falconer Part II: Science 5. Maxwell and the Science of Colour 101 malcolm longair 6. Maxwell and the Rings of Saturn 115 andrew whitaker 7. Maxwell’s Kinetic Theory 1859–70 139 elizabeth garber 8. Maxwell and the Theory of Liquids 154 john s. rowlinson 9. Maxwell’s Famous (or Infamous) Demon 163 andrew whitaker 10. Maxwell’s Contributions to Electricity and Magnetism 187 daniel m. siegel 11. The Maxwellians: The Reception and Further Development of Maxwell’s Electromagnetic Theory 204 chen-pang yeang contents | ix 12. The Fluid Dynamics of James Clerk Maxwell 223 keith moffatt Part III: Poetry, Religion and Conclusions 13. Boundaries of Perception: James Clerk Maxwell’s Poetry of Self, Senses and Science 233 stella pratt-smith 14. Maxwell, Faith and Physics 258 philip l. marston 15. I Remember Years and Labours as a Tale that I have Read 292 mark mccartney Notes on Contributors 301 Notes and References 303 Index 355 x | contents PART I Life CHAPTER 1 Introduction raymond flood James Clerk Maxwell’s work on electricity and magnetism was such that Einstein enthused: Since Maxwell’s time, Physical Reality has been thought of as represented by continuous fields ...and not capable of any mechanical interpretation.