James Maxwell, Science, College Term Papers.com


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James Maxwell

James Maxwell James Clerk Maxwell, a Scottish physicist, is arguably one of the top ten physicists of all time. His major contributions to the world of science are still relied upon today, years after their development and discovery. Maxwell, who lived from 1831 to 1879, is said to be the Einstein and the Newton of the nineteenth century. Responsible for many scientific achievements, Maxwell is most famous for his works involving prediction of electromagnetic waves and the consequent unification of electromagnetism and light. Maxwell's major contributions to science extend over a wide variety of fields, including optics, color vision, elasticity, and the behavior of the dynamical top. The work that established him as a foremost natural scientist was his analysis of Saturn's rings, in which he showed that they could not be rigid but must be made up of swarms of particles whose stability he analyzed. He invented the idea of a ``distribution function'' governing the velocities of the individual molecules of the gas, and proposed the ``Maxwellian'' expression for its equilibrium form. Maxwell's formulation of electricity and magnetism was published in A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873), which included the formulas today known as Maxwell Equations. Maxwell also showed that these equations implicitly required the existence of electromagnetic wave traveling at the speed of light. He also proposed a physical ether theory. He abandoned attempts to formulate a specific mechanical model, instead using the formalism of Lagrangian dynamics. His theory of electromagnetic fields led directly to the existence of electromagnetic waves as they are known today. Bibliography:

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