On this day in physics: 08 March 1871 - James Clark Maxwell was the first apointee of the Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge. At the time Maxwell was a relatively unknown physicist, and had yet to do his best work regarding electromagnetism.
Word of the Day- Maxwell Equations- There are four Maxwell Equations which led him to be the heavyweight in physics that he is. These four equations deal with the nature of electromagnetic waves, which we also know define how light behaves, because light is an electromagnetic wave. In my senior level electromagnetics II course in college (oh by the way they don't even introduce maxwell equations until electromagnetics TWO.), these are pretty much all you need. They do everything to describe light. So, the four laws are as follows: Gauss's Law, Gauss's Magnetism Law, Ampere's Law, and Faraday's Law. Now, from the sounds of it, he just compiled together from three other guys some laws and made them his own. Kind of yes and kind of no. What he did was consolidate known electromagnetic behaviour in such a way that definitively showed that electricity and magnetism are intertwined in a way that cannot be separated. They induce each other. The other monster thing that he did was this little nugget of information that the speed limit for the propagation of an electromagnetic wave is the same as the speed of light, AND THAT LIGHT IS IN FACT AN ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVE. That is a big deal.
I think we'll dig into each equation on its own for exclusive words of the day, because there is way too much to do in just a single episode. Maybe the next time we have a lapse, we'll do a monster Maxwell Equations episode to bring us right up to speed.
Quote of the Day: "[Maxwell's Work] is the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since Newton" - Albert Einstein [Source]
Keywords: Maxwell, Equations, Electromagnetics, Waves, Light, Flux
