
Celebrating James Maxwell, the Father of Light - Hooke
https://cosmosmagazine.com/physical-sciences/celebrating-james-maxwell-father-light
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jhallenworld
Don't forget Oliver Heaviside: The four equations we all know come from him:
[http://theinstitute.ieee.org/technology-focus/technology-
his...](http://theinstitute.ieee.org/technology-focus/technology-history/did-
you-know-someone-else-wrote-maxwells-equations)

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zeristor
BBC Scotland (the glories of iPlayer) has just run a documentary on James
Clerk Maxwell; I'm saddened that BBC doesn't think it worth running the
programme for the whole of the UK.
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06rd56j](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06rd56j)

They say you halve your audience with each formula in a talk, any talk about
Maxwell is going to have four formulae in it, the secret is to put them at the
end... or a subliminal frame; science by blipverts!

I take it Egyptology has this problem with hieroglyphs.

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analog31
I learned long ago that when managers see an equation in a report, they assume
that the work is incomplete, otherwise you would have solved the equation and
reported the answer.

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phkahler
Serious physics question here. So Maxwell showed that electromagnetic waves
travel at the speed of light. But I don't believe he actually proved that
light is electromagnetic waves. The question: Has anyone shown a model of
light using Maxwells equations, that behaves in all the ways light does? That
needs to include packets of energy like photons - can any form of soliton
exist with Maxwell, and does it behave like a photon? Is there an actual model
of light based on his work?

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analog31
Disclaimer: I'm a physicist, but have been out of physics research for 20+
years.

The answer is No. The photon model doesn't come out of Maxwell's equations.
You can tell, at a glance, by the absence of Planck's constant.

Digging just a bit deeper, there are some problems that can be solved using
Maxwell's equations, but I don't know which of those problems already had
adequate solutions before Maxwell. For instance the laws of reflection and
refraction (e.g., Snell's Law) can be solved by applying Maxwell's equations
at a surface boundary between two materials, but I believe they were
empirically known already.

As for photons, it's actually the reverse of what you are asking for.
Maxwell's equations come out of the photon model. The reason is that classical
electromagnetic theory was already successful by the time that quantum
mechanics emerged, so the corresponding QM theories were designed so that
classical theory would be preserved as a limiting case. One of the tests of
any candidate QM theory would have been: Does it preserve our existing
observational evidence about the macroscopic world?

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nickcw
If you enjoyed this article, then you might like Will Self's short (5 x 15
minute) series of podcasts on Maxwell.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06rlkwb/episodes/downloads](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06rlkwb/episodes/downloads)

Hopefully they are available outside the UK!

