{"id":100383,"date":"2023-06-04T14:54:14","date_gmt":"2023-06-04T20:54:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=100383"},"modified":"2023-06-04T14:55:27","modified_gmt":"2023-06-04T20:55:27","slug":"science-and-religion-a-great-scottish-example","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2023\/06\/science-and-religion-a-great-scottish-example.html","title":{"rendered":"Science and Religion: A Great Scottish Example"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

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A portrait of James Clerk Maxwell by Jemima Blackburn
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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We drove through Aberdeen today \u2014 we\u2019ve been in Aberdeenshire pretty much the whole time that we\u2019ve been in Scotland \u2014 and it got me to thinking about the great James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), who was a Scot \u2014 born in Edinburgh \u2014 and who was affiliated for a few years with the University of Aberdeen.\u00a0 I make no claim of originality for what follows.\u00a0 I\u2019ve simply culled some things from the Wikipedia article on Maxwell that interested me, as well as one or two other places:<\/p>\n

The list of his achievements is stunning, and they are commonly ranked with those of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.\u00a0 In fact, in one sizable poll of prominent modern physicists, Maxwell was voted the third greatest physicist of all time, behind only those two.\u00a0 He is generally regarded as the most influential nineteenth-century physicist on the physics of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n

He is credited, for example, with the creation of the classical theory\u00a0of\u00a0electromagnetic radiation, the first theory to describe electricity, magnetism, and light as different manifestations of the same phenomenon.\u00a0 In fact, his equations for electromagnetism have been termed the \u201csecond great unification in physics\u201d<\/sup> \u2014\u00a0 the first one having been achieved by Isaac Newton.\u00a0 In 1865, Maxwell demonstrated that electric\u00a0and\u00a0magnetic fields\u00a0travel through space as\u00a0waves that move at the speed of light and he proposed that light is an undulation in the same medium that is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena.<\/sup>\u00a0 This idea led him to predict the existence of radio waves.<\/p>\n

Maxwell\u2019s discoveries helped to create modern physics, laying the foundation for such theories as special relativity and quantum mechanics \u2014 and they undergird not only radio, but television, smartphones, and the Internet.\u00a0 On the centennial of his birth, Einstein is reported to have described Maxwell\u2019s work as the \u201cmost profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton.\u201d \u00a0When, during a visit to the University of Cambridge in 1922, Einstein was told by his host that he had achieved great things because he stood on the shoulders of Isaac Newton (who was affiliated for much of his life with Cambridge), Einstein replied: \u201cNo I don\u2019t. I stand on the shoulders of Maxwell.\u201d\u00a0 (Fortunately, Maxwell too was significantly associated with Cambridge.)\u00a0 In fact, I\u2019ve read somewhere that, as an inspiration, Einstein kept a portrait of Maxwell on his wall.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not necessary to be a physicist, or even to understand precisely what all of the items on Wikipedia\u2019s list of what James Clerk Maxwell is \u201cknown for\u201d are<\/em> \u2014 I<\/em> certainly don\u2019t! \u2014 in order to sense from them the depth and the range of his contributions:<\/p>\n

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