JAMES CLARK MAXWELL. - Scientist, b. in Edinburgh on 13 June 1831, d. in Cambridge on 5 Nov. 1879. He pursued his studies in physics at the local University and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was professor of physics at Marischal College, Aberdeen (1856-60), and of physics and astronomy at King’s College, London (1860-65). Retiring thereafter to Scotland, he devoted himself to his theoretical studies until 1871, when he was called as professor to the University of Cambridge.
Maxwell left an indelible mark on the history of physics. Passing over his valuable writings on the dynamical theory of heat and the dynamical theory of gases, which he reconstructed and developed in accordance with the preceding thermodynamic theory and which even today are fundamentally governed by “Maxwell’s law,” as well as several other valuable publications, it must be noted as exceptionally important his brilliant synthetic treatment of the whole of electrology from the standpoint of contiguous actions (i.e., with the complete exclusion of any hypothesis of action at a distance), in accordance with the ideas defended by Faraday.
The question was certainly not an easy one. Under the impression of the imposing results obtained by applying Newton’s law of universal gravitation to problems of celestial mechanics and 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 when it could be reduced to Newtonian or Coulombian action at a distance. The repugnance that Newton himself had felt toward the consideration of such forces was by then 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 electrical, magnetic, and electromagnetic phenomena as unfolding, not through action 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 unconventional insights, Faraday discovered and coordinated the imposing and fundamental complex of induction phenomena, many desired to see them expressed in a more theoretical form. Among those who attempted to solve this formidable problem, Maxwell achieved results that transformed the entire framework of electrology. The eight remarkable equations that summarize it, and which, at least in part, he had intuited rather than deduced (even provoking violent criticism for his unorthodox methods), led among other things to the prediction of electromagnetic waves, to the demonstration that they could advantageously replace Fresnel’s elastic waves in the development of optics, thereby eliminating the paradoxical rigid ether, or, in other words, to the establishment of electromagnetic optics and thus to the prediction and later experimental discovery of many new phenomena.