What are the contributions James Clerk Maxwell Made?
I’ve got a degree in physics, so I’ve had time to think about this in many an E&M class! Obviously you can just google him or look him up or wikipedia, his specific contributions are pretty much the modern theory of electromagnetism, summarized in his famous Maxwell’s Equations, a set of differential equations which when you can solve in terms of the electric and magnetic fields and get the classic differential equation for waves, and even find the SPEED of the wave, which Maxwell saw to be the speed of light. So before anybody realized light was a wave, Maxwell proved it with nothing but math, AND he showed how fast it was My own two cents is that I rank him next to or higher than Einstein in terms of great physicists(not that it’s worth “ranking” them, they’re all smart guys, but if I had to…) Some physicists were incomparable mathematical geniuses(Fermi and Schrodinger et al) and some were incredibly intuitive and had disturbing sharp insight into how the universe worked (Einstein
