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The contribution of one of the greatest scientist of the last century -James Clerk Maxwell - will be presented as his name is synonymous with the development of modern physics. He laid the basic foundation for electricity, magnetism, and optics. The theory on electromagnetism is one of the few theories where the equations have not changed since its original conception, whereas their interpretations have gone through revolutionary changes at least twice. He introduced the terms "curl", "convergence" and" gradient". Nowadays, the convergence is replaced by its negative, which is called "divergence", and the other two are still in the standard mathematical literature. The first revolution was by Hertz and Heaviside and the second by Larmor. Maxwell's work on electromagnetic theory was only a very small part of his research. In his hands electricity first became a mathematically exact science and the same might be said of other larger parts of Physics. In whatever area he worked, he brought new innovation.
He published five books and approximately 100 papers. Maxwell can be considered as one of the world's greatest scientists even if he had never worked on electricity and magnetism. His influence is everywhere, which surprisingly is quite unknown to most scientists and engineers! The talk will describe some of that research including for example, the ophthalmoscope and the Maxwell's yellow spot test for macular degeneration, the three colors used in color television, as inventor of the concept of ensemble averaging and the developer of the concept of entropy which was expounded by Leo Szilard and others as information theory. He took the first color photograph, laid the basic foundation on the choice of three primary colors in characterizing any color, and developed accessories for color blind people, which are still used today. He developed general laws of Optical instruments and even developed a theory on the composition of Saturn's rings. He created a standard for electrical resistance. He also wrote the first paper on negative feed back which was the cornerstone of Norbert Wiener's work on cybernetics. He also developed the system of dimensional analysis and surprisingly the method of solving the loop currents as the ratio of determinants, to name a few. He developed a coherent set of units of measurement of electricity and magnetism, which became misleadingly known as the Gaussian system.
Even though Maxwell has influenced development in many areas of physical sciences and had started a revolution in the way physicists look at the world, he is not very well known, unfortunately, outside some selected scientific communities. The reasons for that will also be described.
REFERENCE
[1] Tapan K. Sarkar, Robert J. Mailloux, Arthur A. Oliner, Magdalena Salazar-Palma and Dipak L. Sengupta, "History of Wireless," John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2006.
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