The Man Who Changed Everything Quotes

“Most creative scientists, even the most prolific and versatile, produce one theory per subject. When that theory has run its course they move on to another topic, or stop inventing. Maxwell was unique in the way he could return to a topic and imbue it with new life by taking an entirely fresh approach.”
― Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell

“One of the things Maxwell learned from his reading was the fallibility of men's efforts to understand the world. All of the great scientists had made mistakes. He was acutely aware of his own tendency to make errors in calculation.”
― Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell

“He wrote up the mathematics and everything fitted together. James had shown how the electrical and magnetic forces which we experience could have their seat not in physical objects like magnets and wires but in energy stored in the space between and around the bodies. Electrostatic energy was potential energy, like that of a spring; magnetic energy was rotational, like that in a flywheel, and both could exist in empty space. And these two forms of energy were immutably linked: a change in one was always accompanied by a change in the other. The model demonstrated how they acted together to produce all known electromagnetic phenomena.”
― Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell

“Maxwell's greatest work shows two unique characteristics which stem from his philosophical insight. The first is the way he could return to a subject, often after a gap of several years and take it to new heights using an entirely fresh approach. He did this twice with electromagnetism. The second is even more remarkable. His electromagnetic theory embodied the notion that things we can measure directly, like mechanical force, are mery the outward manifestations of deeper processes, involving entities like electric field strength, which are beyond our powers of visualization. This presages the view that twentieth century scientists came to. As Banesh Hoffmann puts it in The Strange Story of the Quantum: "There is simply no way at all of picturing the fundamental atomic processes of nature in terms of space, time and causality.”
― Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell

“David Hume, the great eighteenth century Scottish philosopher, had put the cat among the pigeons with his notion of scepticism: that nothing can be proved, except in mathematics, and that much of what we take to be fact is merely conjecture.”
― Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell

“Now the only thing which can be directly perceived by the senses is Force, to which may be reduced light, heat, electricity, sound and all the other things which can be perceived by the senses.”
― Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell

“In the Treatise James made an important new prediction from his electromagnetic theory-that electromagnetic waves exert a radiation pressure. Bright sunlight, he calculated, presses on the earth's surface with a force of around 4 pounds per square mile, equivalen to 7 grams per hectare. This was too tiny a value to be observable in everyday life and its detection posed a challenge to experimenters. Eventually, in 1900, the Russian physicist Pyotr Lebedev succeeded, and confirmed James' prediction. Although small on an earthly scale, radiation pressure is one of the factors that shape the universe. Without it there would be no stars like our sun-it is internal radiation pressure that stops them from collapsing under their own gravity. James' discovery also helped to explain a phebomenon that had puzzled astronomers for centuries-why comets' tails point away from the sun.”
― Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell

“Leo Szilard, in 1929, showed that the very act of acquiring information about a system increases its entropy in proportion to the amount of information gathered. As the entropy increases, less of the system's total heat energy is available for doing work. To gather enough information to work the shutter effectively we would have to use up, or render inaccessible, an amount of energy at least equal to the work output of any machine that we could drive from the system. So we will never be clever enough to create perpetual motion. Through the work of Szilard and others, Maxwell's demon helped to spark the creation of information theory, now an essential part of the theoretical basis of communications and computing.”
― Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell

“His system of equations worked with jewelled precision. Its construction had been an immense feat of sustained creative effort in three stages spread over 9 years. The whole route was paved with inspired innovations but from a historical perspective one crucial step stands out-the idea that electric currents exist in empty space. It is these displacement currents that give the equations their symmetry and make the waves possible. Without them the term @E/@t in equation (4) becomes zero and the whole edifice crumbles.”
― Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell

“The E and H waves always travel together: neither can exist alone. They vibrate at right angles to each other and are always in phase.”
― Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell

“It sometimes happens that mathematical methods conceived in the abstract turn out later to be so well suited to a particular application that they might have been written especially for it. When he was wrestling with the problems of general relativity, Albert Einstein came across the tensor calculus, invented 50 years earlier by Curbastro Gregorio Ricci and Tullio Levi-Civita, and saw that it was exactly what he needed. James enlisted a method that had been created in the mid-eighteenth century by Joseph-Louis Lagrange.”
― Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell

“Most creative scientists, even the most prolific and versatile, produce one theory per subject. When that theory has run its course they move on to another topic, or stop inventing. Maxwell was unique in the way he could could return to a topic and imbue it with new life by taking an entirely fresh approach. To the end of his life there was not one subject in which his well of inventiveness showed signs of exhaustion. With each new insight he would strengthen the foundations of the subject and trim away any expendable superstructure. In his first paper on elctromagnetism he had used the analogy of fluid flow to describe static electric and magnetic effects. In the second he had invented a mechanical model of rotating cells and idle wheels to explain all known electromagnetic effects and to predict two new ones, displacement current and waves. Evem the most enlightened of his contemporaries thought that the next step should be to refine the model, to try to find the true mechanism. But perhaps he was already sensing that the ultimate mechanisms of nature may be beyond our powers of comprehension. He decided to put the model on one side and build the theory afresh, using
only the principles of dynamics: the mathematical laws which govern matter and motion.”
― Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell

“In fact, confusion over units was not confined to electricity and magnetism. When two people spoke of a quantity like 'force' or 'power' you could not be sure that they meant the same thing. James saw a prime opportunity to straighten out the muddle. He went beyond his brief for the paper and proposed a systematic way of defining all physical quantities in terms of mass, length and time, symbolised by the letters M, L and T. For example, velocity was defined L/T, acceleration L/T^2, and force ML/T^2, since, by Newton's second law, force=mass x acceleration. His method is used in exactly this form today. Called dimensional analysis, it seems to us so simple and so natural a part of all physical science that almost nobody wonders who first thought of it.”
― Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell

“The new law that he predicted seemed to defy common sense. It was that the viscosity of a gas-the internal frictional that causes drag on a body moved through it-is independent of its pressure. One might expect a more compressed gas to exert a greater drag; even James was surprised at first that the theory said otherwise. But further thought showed that, at higher pressure, the effect on a moving body of being surrounded by more molecules is exactly counteracted by the screening effect they provide: each molecule travels, on average, a shorter distance before it collides with another one. A few years later, James and Katherine themselves did the experiment which showed the prediction to be correct.”
― Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell

“He had made a discovery of the first magnitude. It opened up an entirely new approach to physics, which led to statistical mechanics, to a proper understanding of thermodynamics and to the use of probability distributions in quantum mechanics. If he had done nothing else, this breakthrough would have been enough to put him among the world's great scientists.”
― Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell

“Happy is the man who can recognise in the work of Today a connected portion of the work of life, and an embodiment of the work of Eternity ...”
― Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell

“James was generous with his time to any friend who needed it—as well as to some, like Lawson, who did not! When one friend had eye trouble and could not read, James spent an hour each evening reading out his bookwork for the next day. He bucked up fellow students when they were depressed and on several occasions nursed others who were sick. He helped freshmen who were having trouble with their studies. He also found time to keep up a lively correspondence with his father, Aunt Jane, Lewis Campbell and others.”
― Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell

“I know the tendency of the human mind is to do anything rather than think. But mental labour is not thought, and those who have with labour acquired the habit of application, often find it much easier to get up a formula than to master a principle.”
― Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell

“First, electric charges attract or repel one another with a force inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them: unlike charges attract, like ones repel. Second, magnetic poles attract or repel one another in a similar way but always come in pairs: every north pole is yoked to a south pole7. Third,”
― Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell

“Goodness knows what Maxwell would make of our current relish for watching people indulging in histrionic self-exposure on television. He would certainly have a wry smile at the irony of the fact that his own electromagnetic theory provides the means of bringing such unwholesome displays into our homes.”
― Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell

“... I think that the results which each man arrives at in his attempts to harmonise his science with his Christianity ought not to be regarded as having any significance except to the man himself, and to him only for a time, and should not receive the stamp of a society. For it is in the nature of science, especially those branches of science which are spreading into unknown regions, to be continually changing e.”
― Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell

“His electromagnetic theory embodied the notion that things we can measure directly, like mechanical force, are merely the outward manifestations of deeper processes, involving entities like electric field strength, which are beyond our powers of visualisation. This”
― Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell

“little of the work of Faraday and others on electricity and magnetism had yet fed through to practical application. In short, science was a splendid hobby for a gentleman but a poor profession.”
― Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell

“His faith was the guiding principle of his life but it was an intensely reflective personal faith which could not be contained within the rules of a sect. Institutional politics, whether of the church, the state or the university, was a topic that never engaged his interest.”
― Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell

“Maxwell was not only one of the most brilliant and influential scientists who ever lived but an altogether fine and engaging man. And”
― Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell