Session B19: Invited Session: One Hundred Fifty Years of Maxwell's Equations (1862-2012)

The discovery of Maxwell's equations

In January 1865, Maxwell at age 34 wrote a letter to his cousin Charles Cay describing various doings, including his work on the viscosity of gases and a visit from two of the world's leading oculists to inspect the eyes of his dog ``Spice''. He added, ``I have also a paper afloat, with an electromagnetic theory of light, which, till I am convinced to the contrary, I hold to be great guns.'' That paper ``A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field'' was his fourth on the subject. It was followed in 1868 by another, and then in 1873 by his massive two volume \underline {Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism}. Even so, by the time of his death in 1879 as he was beginning a radically revised edition of the \underline {Treatise}, much remained to be done. We celebrate here the 150$^{th}$ anniversary of Maxwell's first astonished realization in 1862 of the link between electromagnetism and light. So revolutionary was this that 15 or more years went by before Lorentz, Poynting, FitzGerald, and others came to address it, sometimes with improvements, sometimes not. Not until 1888 did Hertz make the essential experimental discovery of radio waves. What is so remarkable about Maxwell's five papers is that each presents a complete view of the subject radically different from the one before. I shall say something about each, emphasizing in particular Maxwell's most unexpected idea, the displacement current, so vastly more interesting than the accounts of it found in textbooks today. Beyond lie other surprises. The concept of gauge invariance, and the role the vector potential would play in defining the canonical momentum of the electron, both go back to Maxwell. In 1872 came a paper ``On the Mathematical Classification of Physical Quantities'', which stands as an education in itself. Amid much else, there for the first time appears the distinction between axial and polar vectors and those new operational concepts related to quaternion theory: \textit{curl, divergence, }and\textit{ gradient}.   

Maxwellians and the Remaking of Maxwell's Equations

Although James Clerk Maxwell first formulated his theory of the electromagnetic field in the early 1860s, it went through important changes before it gained general acceptance in the 1890s. Those changes were largely the work of a group of younger physicists, the Maxwellians, led by G. F. FitzGerald in Ireland, Oliver Lodge and Oliver Heaviside in England, and Heinrich Hertz in Germany. Together, they extended, refined, tested, and confirmed Maxwell's theory, and recast it into the set of four vector equations known ever since as ``Maxwell's equations.'' By tracing how the Maxwellians remade and disseminated Maxwell's theory between the late 1870s and the mid-1890s, we can gain a clearer understanding not just of how the electromagnetic field was understood at the end of the 19th century, but of the collaborative nature of work at the frontiers of physics.   

Using Maxwell's Equations in the late 1800s

Between the publication of Maxwell's \textit{Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism }in 1873 and the early 1900s his field equations were not considered to be fundamental by many Cambridge-trained physicists Instead, they were thought to derive from Hamilton's principle given an appropriate energy expression. Such an expression usually assigned a velocity or a position function to field quantities, though this was not invariably done. Precisely because the Hamiltonian, and not the derivative field equations, was taken to be basic, new effects could be generated by adding terms to the energy expression. This was how the Faraday and Kerr magneto-optic effects were handled. The program however never did generate a method for incorporating dissipative phenomena, as Oliver Heaviside (who disliked the use of Hamilton's principle) demonstrated. The procedure was in the end decisively abandoned when J. G. Leathem, a student of Joseph Larmor a Cambridge, demonstrated that it could not handle a particularly subtle magneto-optic process.   

Taking Off From Maxwell's Equations

I will discuss how we are still discovering new continents in the conceptual world opened up by Maxwell's equations. I will very briefly sketch, in particular, how very natural extensions of those equations describe superconductivity and the deep structure of fundamental particle interactions. Then I'll show how a newer cluster of extensions connects ideas about (perhaps no longer all that) exotic quantum particles and materials.