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11 unusual facts about James Clerk Maxwell


Alternatives to general relativity

At the end of the 19th century, many tried to combine Newton's force law with the established laws of electrodynamics, like those of Weber, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Bernhard Riemann and James Clerk Maxwell.

Carl Anton Bjerknes

He tried to explain the electrodynamics of James Clerk Maxwell by hydrodynamical analogies and similarly he proposed a mechanical explanation of gravitation.

Edward Condon

Condon said he replied: "I believe in Archimedes' Principle, formulated in the third century B.C. I believe in Kepler's laws of planetary motion, discovered in the seventeenth century. I believe in Newton's laws...." and continued with a catalog of scientists from earlier centuries, including the Bernoulli, Fourier, Ampère, Boltzmann, and Maxwell.

GeForce 800 Series

It will serve as the introduction for the Maxwell architecture (GM-codenamed chips), named after the Scottish theoretical physicist James Clerk Maxwell.

George Sweigert

His later years were spent trying to perfect antennae designs, applying the work of James Clerk Maxwell's work on electromagnetic theory and Maxwell's Equations.

Giovanni Giorgi

Toward the end of the 19th century, after James Clerk Maxwell's discoveries, it was clear that electric measurements could not be explained in terms of the three fundamental units of length, mass and time.

History of manifolds and varieties

Henri Poincaré's 1895 paper Analysis Situs studied three-and-higher-dimensional manifolds(which he called "varieties"), giving rigorous definitions of homology, homotopy (which had originally been defined in the context of late nineteenth-century knot theory, developed by Maxwell and others), and Betti numbers and raised a question, today known as the Poincaré conjecture, based his new concept of the fundamental group.

Jemima Blackburn

The youngest daughter of James Wedderburn, Solicitor General for Scotland, and a first cousin of James Clerk Maxwell, Jemima was a friend and pupil of John Ruskin and Sir Edwin Landseer, both of whom praised her work highly.

Melde's experiment

Later, the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in his study of the wave nature of light succeeded in expressing waves and the electromagnetic spectrum in a mathematical formula.

Nebular hypothesis

A major critique came during the 19th century from James Clerk Maxwell who maintained that different rotation between the inner and outer parts of a ring could not allow condensation of material.

Walter Newall

His built works included villas at Cardoness (1828), for Sir David Maxwell, Baronet, and Glenlair, Corsock (1830), home of mathematician and theoretical physicist James Clerk Maxwell.


George FitzGerald

Along with Oliver Lodge, Oliver Heaviside and Heinrich Hertz, FitzGerald was a leading figure among the group of "Maxwellians" who revised, extended, clarified, and confirmed James Clerk Maxwell's mathematical theories of the electromagnetic field during the late 1870s and the 1880s.

Induction coil

They were used by Hertz to demonstrate the existence of electromagnetic waves, as predicted by James Maxwell and by Lodge and Marconi in the first research into radio waves.

Prosper-René Blondlot

Born in Nancy, France, he spent most of his early years there, teaching physics at the University, being awarded three prestigious prizes of the Académie des Sciences for his experimental work on the consequences of Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism.

West Cambridge

The West Cambridge site covers the area between the M11 motorway, Madingley Road, Clerk Maxwell Road and the Coton Footpath.