Appliance of science

Published on Saturday 4 October 2003 01:00

The Man Who Changed Everything: A Life of James Clerk Maxwell by Basil Mahon, Wiley, £18.99

About six years ago a full-page article in The Scotsman reported the long overdue establishment of the James Clerk Maxwell Foundation. Occupying his birthplace at 14 India Street in Edinburgh, the house contains a study centre and meeting place for those interested in the mathematical sciences, as well as a collection of memorabilia for those who wish to pay homage to one of the world’s greatest physicists.

By virtue of his work on colour vision, Saturn’s rings, molecular theory and, above all, electromagnetism, Maxwell deserves to be counted among epoch-making scientists such as Newton and Einstein. But Maxwell is not just The Man Who Changed Everything, he is also The Man That Nobody Knows About.

For most people, Maxwell’s overwhelmingly important contribution to theoretical physics simply does not register alongside the more glamorous achievements of others. By popular consent the telephone belongs to Bell, the wireless to Marconi, television to Baird, but schoolchildren only learn about Maxwell because of the trivial corkscrew law that governs the motion of an electric motor. Few Aberdonians seem to know that Maxwell is the most distinguished figure to have occupied the chair of natural philosophy at Marischal College - moreover that the Music Hall was built to host a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science during his tenure. Many people think they know who he was but, in fact, they don’t have a clue. "Was he anything to do with the invention of instant coffee?" asks one of my better-read friends.

James Clerk Maxwell obviously needs a champion. There’s ample appreciation within the scientific community, particularly from fellow physicists and mathematicians. There is commemoration of a sort in the vast bulk of the James Clerk Maxwell Building at Edinburgh University. But the public at large, particularly in his native Scotland, is left cold by the quiet-spoken country laird from Dumfriesshire.

Part of the problem is that Maxwell’s greatest work was done inside his head. Intractable problems were despatched to what he called "the department of the mind conducted independently of consciousness". When solutions emerged in due course they came as dense mathematical statements that baffled many of his peers and often as not needed the re-interpretation of another mind. His most famous work on electromagnetism, for instance, may well have stalled without the elucidation of Oliver Heaviside, who transformed Maxwell’s four famous equations into a useable form.

From the earliest age, Maxwell was driven by an insatiable curiosity about the world around him. He continually asked "What’s the go of that?", and if given an unsatisfactory answer would persist with "But what’s the particular go of it?" At school in Edinburgh he earned the nickname Daffy (translated as Dafty in this book) but by the age of 15 had published his first paper (on the geometry of the oval) and was at Edinburgh University studying law a year later in 1847. Within three years he had gone to Cambridge as a scientist.

From an academic point of view, his career thereafter was unremarkable: appointments in Aberdeen, London, and Cambridge with a number of failed applications in between. As the laird of Glenlair, between Corsock and Dalbeattie, he was dutiful and popular, spending at least four months a year attending to estate business. He married Katherine Dewar, whom history has perhaps unfairly described as a difficult woman. They had no children. On Maxwell’s early death at the age of 48, Glenlair passed to cousins and is now a ruin, having burnt down in 1929.

Basil Mahon’s short biography is a sincere and affectionate. A former officer in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, the author claims a long period of fascination with his subject, reinforced by the paradoxical nature of a scientist revered by a few but unknown to most.

Mahon’s approach is strictly chronological, but the largely uneventful nature of Maxwell’s life makes for rather dull reading. It is a long time since I have read a popular biography that apologises for digressions, or one that so conscientiously signposts those parts of the narrative that have slipped out of the chronological framework.

Mahon’s sympathetic approach eventually becomes cloying. Throughout the book he calls Maxwell by his first name James, an irritation that does not diminish by repetition. In places where one might expect the narrative to be spiced up with irascible, avaricious, or petulant colleagues, Mahon only seems to encounter charm and generosity. Maxwell was not perfect. He was a lousy lecturer, an obsessive poet, and a haphazard experimenter. His papers are littered with elementary mistakes. But Mahon is too genial to relish the opportunity of using these facets of his character to create a more provocative picture of his subject.

This is not a science text book. It would be impossible to explain Maxwell’s work thoroughly in so short a book but Mahon does his best to describe his main achievements in plain English, with only a few diagrams and a handful of equations. But it is in some senses a pointless task. For if one were to sum up Maxwell’s work in one statement, it is that he was the first the realise that the underlying reality of many natural phenomena can only be described in mathematical terms. In 1857, he attempted to explain the existence of Saturn’s rings, which common sense dictates should either collapse or fly off into space. For his solution he had no need of a telescope: it was a purely mathematical analysis that has yet to be bettered. In 1860 he opened up an entirely new branch of physics, when he realised that thermodynamics could be explained in terms of statistical mechanics.

Even Maxwell’s greatest legacy to the modern world - the theory of electromagnetism - can only really be expressed mathematically. Not for Maxwell the publicity stunts of Michael Faraday, who observed electromagnetic effects but could not explain them, nor even the triumphant experiment by Heinrich Hertz in 1888, when he demonstrated the existence of the electromagnetic waves that Maxwell had predicted 15 years earlier. Whereas others produced tangible results from nebulous theory, Maxwell did the opposite. In realising that the ultimate mechanisms of nature lie beyond our direct experience, but within the power of mathematics, he opened up a new era of scientific thought but at the same time closed the door on popular understanding.