Back in the Day: The Scottish genius whose legacy is everywhere

In no order of importance, this mathematician and physicist was responsible for Maxwell’s equations, relations, distribution, theorem, displacement current, coil, and wheel among others. The Maxwell (Mx) unit of magnetic flux is named after him, as is the Maxwell Gap in the rings of Saturn – more about that later. One of the main buildings at Edinburgh University is named after him, as well as ones at Cambridge University and King’s College, London, and the science centre at his alma mater, Edinburgh Academy.

One of the world’s largest telescopes is named after Maxwell. He has an asteroid named after him, as well as a crater on the far side of the Moon plus a mountain range on Venus. The James Clerk Maxwell Foundation in his native Edinburgh does sterling work in promoting his name, and he also has a stunning statue in the capital as well as a memorial tablet in Westminster Abbey. He has his own panel in the Great Tapestry of Scotland and features in another panel, too.

How important was he? How about these two tributes from none other than Albert Einstein: “The special theory of relativity owes its origins to Maxwell’s equations of the electromagnetic field …” and “The work of James Clerk Maxwell changed the world forever.”

Or how about this from Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Planck: “He achieved greatness unequalled.”

Or from our own time as stated by the late, great cosmologist Carl Sagan: “Maxwell’s equations have had a greater impact on human history than any 10 presidents.”

He was also a poet and created the world’s first durable fixed-colour photograph. In a millennium poll, he was voted the third-greatest physicist, behind only Sir Isaac Newton and Einstein. Not bad for a man who only lived to the age of 48.

James Clerk Maxwell is revered mainly because his theoretical work on electromagnetism paved the way for modern physics such as quantum mechanics and special relativity, as well as framing his famous equations that defined his unifying theory of magnetism, electricity and light that underpins all modern information and communication technologies.

As the foundation states: “Modern technology, in large part, stems from his grasp of the basic principles of the universe. Wide-ranging developments in the field of electricity and electronics, including radio, television, radar and communications, derive from Maxwell’s discovery of the laws of the electromagnetic field – which was not a synthesis of what was known before, but rather a fundamental change in concept that departed from Newton’s view and was to influence greatly the modern scientific and industrial revolution.”

In short, while Maxwell didn’t actually invent our modern world, he pretty much laid the groundwork for it to happen. This columnist being to science what David Mundell is to principled politics, we will concentrate on the life of this truly great Scot.

For ease of reference, I am calling him Maxwell, but Clerk was indeed a vital part of his name as he was of that famed family who were the baronets of Penicuik – his uncle was the 6th baronet – and anyone doubting its importance in the history of Scotland should visit the ancient family seat of Penicuik House, now arguably the most impressive preserved ruin

in the country.

His father was John Clerk, an advocate who inherited Middlebie estate near Corsock in what is now Dumfries and Galloway from the Maxwell family – he added their name to his in their honour. James Clerk Maxwell was born in India Street between Stockbridge and the centre of Edinburgh on June 13, 1831. He was an only child and his mother Frances, nee Cay, was

40 when he was born. His cousin on his mother’s side was William Dyce Cay, the civil engineer who would later become renowned for his work on harbours and who would be Maxwell’s best man and lifelong friend.

Maxwell was raised at Glenlair House on the Middlebie estate from when he was two, and it was clear that he was a prodigy from an early age, although one early tutor thought him slow. Yet, by the age of seven, Maxwell had memorised many poems and whole sections of the Bible – he would remain a committed Christian all his life. He was also proud of his Scottishness, and could recite many of Robert Burns’s poems, learned by heart

as a youngster.

His mother was responsible for his early education, but after her death from abdominal cancer when Maxwell was just eight, he was sent to Edinburgh Academy. He was unhappy there at first before his intellectual curiosity was allowed to roam on subjects outside the school syllabus. He also made two great friends – Lewis Campbell, who would write Maxwell’s biography, and Peter Guthrie Tait, who would also become an eminent physicist.

Maxwell wrote his first science paper at the age of just 14, and it was presented on his behalf to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He started attending classes at Edinburgh University at 16, and three years later he moved to Cambridge where he became a member of the university’s elite secret society, the Apostles.

He graduated from Trinity College with a top-class degree in mathematics, and later he became a fellow of the college while pursuing his researches in various fields such as “Experiments on Colour”, the title of another scientific paper he produced at this time.

At 25, he was appointed professor of natural philosophy at Marischal College in Aberdeen, and divided his time between the college and Glenlair House on the Middlebie estate, which he had inherited on his father’s death in 1856. In Aberdeen Maxwell met Katherine Dewar, seven years his senior and the daughter of the college principal, and they were married in June, 1858. They would have no children.

At this point Maxwell turned his mathematical skills to an age-old problem – what exactly were the rings of Saturn. The most commonly held theory was that they were either a solid or fluid object, but Maxwell stated that they were rings of small particles, a fact that was only finally and conclusively proven when the Voyager spacecraft flew by Saturn in the 1980s. His essay won the Adams Prize of 1857, and earned him a small fortune.

When Marischal and King’s Colleges merged in 1860 to form Aberdeen University, as a much younger man than the rest of the staff, Maxwell lost out on the jobs front and had to move to London to become a professor at another King’s College. One of his first actions was to experiment with colour photography and produce the world’s first durable colour photograph – a tartan ribbon. By this time Maxwell had been elected a fellow of the Royal Society, and he was not even 30.

It was in London that he produced his groundbreaking work on electricity and magnetism. He knew Michael Faraday and the other great scientists of the day who were working on the nature of light and electricity and magnetism, but it was Maxwell who produced the 1873 Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism that influenced, among others, Albert Einstein. He wrote that the “lion’s share in this revolution fell to Clerk Maxwell …”

Einstein added: “He showed that the whole of what was then known about light and electro-magnetic phenomena was expressed in his well-known double system of equations, in which the electric and magnetic fields appear as the dependent variables. Maxwell did indeed try to explain, or justify, these equations by intellectual constructions. But ... the equations alone appeared as the essential thing and the strength of the fields as the ultimate entities, not to be reduced to anything else.”

As he made his findings in fields ranging from theoretical physics to elasticity – a huge contribution to the study of stress testing on structures – Maxwell maintained a commentary on his views on science and life in general, all seen from a Christian viewpoint that saw no problem between faith and the scientific approach.

He once wrote: “Happy is the man who can recognise in the work of

today a connected portion of the work of life and an embodiment of the work of Eternity. The foundations of his confidence are unchangeable, for he has been made a partaker of Infinity. He strenuously works out his daily enterprises because the present is given him for a possession.”

On another occasion he stated: “The history of science shows that even during the phase of her progress in which she devotes herself to improving the accuracy of the numerical measurement of quantities with which she has long been familiar, she is preparing the materials for the subjugation of the new regions, which would have remained unknown if she had been contented with the rough methods of her early pioneers.

One of Maxwell’s greatest achievements was to help found the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, one of the world’s great research institutions. He became its first director in 1871 and pledged that it would be a place for thought as well as experimentation.

He wrote of the Cavendish: “This characteristic of modern experiments — that they consist principally of measurements — is so prominent, that the opinion seems to have got abroad, that in a few years all the great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will then be left to men of science will be to carry on these measurements to another place of decimals.

“If this is really the state of things to which we are approaching, our laboratory may perhaps become celebrated as a place of conscientious labour and consummate skill, but it will be out of place in the university, and ought rather to be classed with the other great workshops of our country, where equal ability is directed to more useful ends.”

In 1873, the honours and awards poured in as Maxwell worked between London, Cambridge, Edinburgh and mostly Glenlair where the peace of the countryside allowed him to think without interruption. He maintained his interest in experimental science, and in 1878 gave one of the first academic lectures on the phenomenon of the telephone, invented by his fellow Scot Alexander Graham Bell and patented just two years previously.

All the while that he was producing revolutionary science, Maxwell was writing poetry, some of it very fine indeed, and which was published during and after his life.

“By the hollow mauntain-side, questions strange I shout for ever, While echoes far and wide, Seem to mock my vain endeavour; Still I shout, for though they never, Cast my borrowed voice aside.”

Nor was he po-faced: The world may be utterly crazy, And life may be labour in vain; But I’d rather be silly than lazy, And would not quit life for its pain.”

In the middle of 1879, Maxwell began to feel ill. He was eventually diagnosed with the same form of abdominal cancer that killed his mother, and he succumbed to the disease at the age of just 48.

He was buried in the family lair at Parton Churchyard near his beloved Glenlair. There is no great monument to him there, but if you want to view the legacy of James Clerk Maxwell, just look around you – it’s everywhere.