MAXWELL, JAMES CLERK. - Scientist, b. in Edinburgh on 13 June 1831, d. in Cambridge on 5 Nov. 1879. He completed his studies in physics at the local University and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was professor of physics at Marischal College in Aberdeen (1856-60) and of physics and astronomy at King's College, London (1860-65). Having then retired to Scotland, he devoted himself to his theoretical studies until 1871, when he was called as a professor to the University of Cambridge.
M. left an imperishable mark on the history of physics. Passing over his valuable writings on the dynamical theory of heat and on the dynamical theory of gases, which he reconstructed and developed in accordance with the earlier thermodynamic theory, and which even today is fundamentally dominated by the "law of M.," as well as over several other valuable publications of his, it should be noted how exceptionally important was his ingenious synthetic treatment of the whole of electrology from the point of view of contiguous actions (that is, with the total exclusion of any hypothesis of action at a distance), according to the ideas defended by Faraday.
The question was certainly not an easy one. Under the impression of the imposing results of the application of Newton's law of universal gravitation to the problems of celestial mechanics and of the analogous laws of electrical and magnetic attractions and repulsions, recently discovered by Coulomb, the 19th century began with the scientific ideal of considering any physical phenomenon as sufficiently interpreted once it could be regarded as reduced to actions at a distance of the Newtonian or Coulombian type. The repugnance that Newton himself had felt for the consideration of those forces had by then been almost generally overcome. But a great physicist who felt the absolute need for intuitive representations of phenomena, Faraday, rejected the common tendency, and sought to conceive the electrical, magnetic and electromagnetic phenomena then known as taking place, not through actions at a distance, but through hypothetical contiguous actions in the medium. These views of Faraday were at first attributed to his inability to follow mathematical abstractions; but when, guided by these unusual views, Faraday discovered and coordinated the imposing and fundamental complex of the phenomena of induction, there arose in many the desire to see them expressed in a more theoretical form. Among those who attempted the resolution of the formidable problem, M. arrived at results that transformed all the great lines of electrology. The eight admirable equations that summarize it and that, at least in part, he had divined rather than deduced (they also give rise to violent criticism for his unorthodox procedures), led among other things to the prediction of electromagnetic waves, to the demonstration that they could replace, with great advantage in the development of optics, Fresnel's elastic waves, eliminating their paradoxical rigid ether or, in other words, to the constitution of electromagnetic optics and therefore to the prediction and then to the experimental discovery of many new phenomena.
Bibliography
Paolo Straneo