MAXWELL, JAMES CLARK. – Scientist, b. in Edinburgh on 13 June 1831, d. in Cambridge on 5 November 1879. He pursued his studies in physics at the local University and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was professor of physics at Marishal College, Aberdeen (1856–60), and of physics and astronomy at King’s College, London (1860–65). He then retired to Scotland and devoted himself to his theoretical studies until 1871, when he was appointed professor at the University of Cambridge.
M. left an enduring 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 preceding thermodynamic theory, and which even today is fundamentally governed by “M.’s law,” as well as several other valuable publications of his, it is important to note his exceptionally significant and ingenious synthetic treatment of the whole of electrology from the standpoint of contiguous actions (that is, with the complete 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 produced by the imposing results of applying 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 nineteenth century began with the scientific ideal of regarding any physical phenomenon as sufficiently interpreted whenever it could be reduced to actions at a distance of the Newtonian or Coulombian type. The repugnance that Newton himself had felt toward considering such forces had by then been almost universally overcome. But a great physicist who felt the absolute need for intuitive representations of phenomena, Faraday, rejected the common tendency and sought to conceive of 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. Faraday’s views were initially 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 induction phenomena, many began to wish to see them expressed in a more theoretical form. Among those who attempted to resolve this formidable problem, M. achieved results that transformed all the major outlines of electrology. The eight admirable equations that summarize it and that, at least in part, rather than being deduced, he had divined (and which also provoked vehement criticism of his unorthodox procedures) led, among other things, to the prediction of electromagnetic waves; to the demonstration that, in the development of optics, they could replace Fresnel’s elastic waves to great advantage, eliminating the paradoxical rigid ether; or, in other terms, to the establishment of electromagnetic optics and hence to the prediction and subsequent experimental discovery of many new phenomena.