{"id":923,"date":"2006-12-13T09:14:21","date_gmt":"2006-12-13T09:14:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/12\/13\/let-us-now-praise-famous-scots\/"},"modified":"2006-12-13T09:14:21","modified_gmt":"2006-12-13T09:14:21","slug":"let-us-now-praise-famous-scots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/12\/13\/let-us-now-praise-famous-scots\/","title":{"rendered":"Let Us Now Praise Famous Scots"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a very nice article in the new Physics World<\/cite> in praise of James Clerk Maxwell<\/a> of “Maxwell’s Equations.” Incredibly, Maxwell is probably somewhat underappreciated, what with wrapping up all of classical electromagnetism in one neat and Lorentz-invariant package, making pioneering contributions to thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, and taking the first color photograph, using basically the same process NASA uses for all those specatcular Hubble images. Sharp guy, that Maxwell.<\/p>\n

He also gets credit for one of the best off-hand announcements of a titanic physics discovery I’ve ever heard:<\/p>\n

\n

On 5 January 1865, while at King’s, Maxwell ended a letter to his cousin Charles Cay about his latest scientific work with the casual remark, “I have also a paper afloat containing an electromagnetic theory of light, which, till I am convinced to the contrary, I hold to be great guns.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I’d love to hear someone at a conference say “Until I am convinced to the contrary, I hold this theory to be great guns.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a very nice article in the new Physics World in praise of James Clerk Maxwell of “Maxwell’s Equations.” Incredibly, Maxwell is probably somewhat underappreciated, what with wrapping up all of classical electromagnetism in one neat and Lorentz-invariant package, making pioneering contributions to thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, and taking the first color photograph, using basically… Continue reading Let Us Now Praise Famous Scots<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/923\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}