Celebrating 150 Years of James Clerk Maxwell

This (2015) is the International Year of Light

by Kumar David-November 14, 2015

The United Nations General Assembly declared 2015 the International Year of Light - full name ‘Light and Light Based Technologies’ - and coincidentally or otherwise 2015 commemorates the 150th anniversary of Maxwell’s Equations. In 1865 Maxwell presented what is known as the second great unification of classical physics (second to Newton); the theory of electromagnetic propagation (light is one version) which underlies cell phones, radar, TV and radio, optics and optical fibres, terrestrial, satellite and space communications and even the discovery of the Higgs boson. The advent of special relativity did not bypass Maxwell’s equations in the way that general relativity superseded Newton’s laws of gravitation; a relativistic reformulation of Maxwell’s original version has sufficed! The illustration accompanying this essay shows Maxwell’s classical vector equations whose pristine beauty has not been surpassed in any rendering of any scientific theory.

Celebrating 150 Years of James Clerk Maxwell This (2015) is the International Year of Light by Thavam Ratna