B N Dwivedi does research in solar physics and teaches physics in
Banaras Hindu University. He has over twenty two years of teaching experience and broad experience in solar research with involvement in almost all the major solar space experiments, including Skylab, Yohkoh, SOHO, and TRACE. The Max-Planck-Institut für Aeronomie recently awarded him the ‘Gold Pin’ in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the SOHO/Sumer experiment.

This article presents a brief account of life and work of James Clerk Maxwell and his equations.

James Clerk Maxwell

James Clerk Maxwell was a physicists’ physicist, the prime author of the modern theory of colour vision, the principal creator of statistical thermodynamics, and above all the author of the classical electromagnetic theory, with its identification of light and electromagnetic waves. Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory is acknowledged as one of the outstanding achievements of nineteenth century physics. If you wake up a physicist in the middle of the night and say ‘Maxwell’, I am sure he will say ‘electromagnetic theory’. Einstein described the change brought about by Maxwell in the conception of physical reality as “the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton”. Maxwell’s description of reality is represented in his double system of partial differential equations in which the electric and magnetic fields appear as dependent variables. Since Maxwell’s time physical reality has been thought of as represented by continuous fields governed by partial differential equations. The advent of quantum mechanics, rather than the theory of relativity, has produced a situation in which we have to deal with amounts of energy concentrated in small spaces. This is in direct contradiction to Maxwell’s equations and to Newtonian mechanics. The quantities that appear in the laws of quantum mechanics make no claim to describe physical reality as such, they describe the probabilities of the appearance of a particular physical reality. Whatever be the difficulties, Maxwell’s theory will always remain a step of outstanding importance in the development of physical ideas.

Read full article (718 Kb)

Address for Correspondence

B N Dwivedi
Department of Applied Physics,
Institute of Technology
Banaras Hindu University,
Varanasi 221005, India.
Email : bholadwivedi@yahoo.combholadwivedi@yahoo.com