James Clerk Maxwell Series

James Clerk Maxwell was a Scottish mathematical physicist whose work fundamentally altered our understanding of electricity, magnetism, and optics. He formulated the key equations describing these phenomena as manifestations of a single electromagnetic field. His discoveries demonstrated that electric and magnetic fields propagate through space as waves at the speed of light, thereby unifying light with electrical phenomena and predicting the existence of radio waves. Maxwell's pioneering work laid the groundwork for modern physics, including special relativity and quantum mechanics, and his influence on 20th-century physics is compared to that of Newton and Einstein.