page_title: James Clerk Maxwell Foundation
section_title: Exhibition Room
hierarchical_section_title: James Clerk Maxwell Foundation / Museum / Exhibition Room
caption_attribution_description: English: Plaque showing Maxwell's equations at the Edinburgh statue.
context_page_description: The James Clerk Maxwell Foundation is a registered Scottish charity set up in 1977. By supporting physics and mathematics, it honours one of the greatest of physicists, James Clerk Maxwell, and works to increase the public awareness of science. It maintains a small museum in Maxwell's birthplace which is in the ownership of the Foundation.
context_section_description: This room, originally the dining room, contains several family portraits: a copy of James Clerk Maxwell by Lowes Cato Dickinson located in Trinity College, Cambridge; and of Maxwell’s father, John Clerk Maxwell. Early pastels from the Cay’s, his mother’s family, of Maxwell’s uncles, Robert and John, his aunt Jane and Maxwell’s mother Frances Cay. These are by Maxwell’s maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Cay, there is also a portrait in oils, after Sir Henry Raeburn, of Elizabeth’s husband Robert Hodshon Cay by Maxwell's cousin, Isabella Cay (1850–1934). The final portrait is of Maxwell’s lifelong friend and scientific colleague Peter Guthrie Tait who was the Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh University.
  One of Maxwell’s major technical advances is the first full colour projected image produced at a time when only black-and-white photography was known. The projection of this coloured image on a screen was famously demonstrated in 1861 at Faraday's Royal Institution in London. In this, the foundation of virtually all practical colour processes, he made three black-and-white photographic plates which were photographed through red, green and blue filters respectively. He then used three magic lanterns to superimpose these three black-and-white images, each projected through the same red, green and blue filters, to produce the first colour image of the ‘tartan ribbon’. This production of colour images is still used today in printing, digital cameras, televisions, and computers.
  The replica of Maxwell’s colour box, which he used to quantitatively analyse and synthesise light colours in order to underpin his observations on colour mixing and colour perception (thereby extending Newton's work on Optics), was produced in the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge University.
  Maxwell’s most celebrated contribution was in deriving the equations governing electromagnetics (Maxwell’s equations). In his 1865 paper, A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field, Maxwell defined electromagnetics in terms of 20 equations, later summarised in his 1873 book Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. Hendrik Lorentz subsequently reinterpreted these as the fundamental equations of electrodynamics and Oliver Heaviside developed the notation we use today.
  The theory behind Maxwell's equations was the first grand unification theory of the forces of Nature as this theory united the electric and magnetic fields. A person who is stationary may experience only an electric field but a person who is in relative motion may experience an electric current and a magnetic field. Thus the one field (called the electromagnetic field) may appear in different guises. 
  In his famous 1905 'Special Relativity' paper, Albert Einstein  showed that Maxwell's equations were invariant under a Lorentz transformation (as opposed to a Galilean transformation) and, inter alia, used this evidence to support his 'relativity theory' that the Lorentz transformation was the true transformation of Nature (between the viewpoints of two observers, one moving at a constant speed and direction relative to each other).
  On display is a replica of part of the balance arm of Maxwell’s apparatus to measure the ratio of electromagnetic to electrostatic units of electrical charge. Maxwell showed mathematically that the numerical value of this ratio was equal to the speed of electromagnetic waves. Maxwell recognised that the speed of electromagnetic waves (as derived from his equations) was also equal to the speed of light as measured by Fizeau and as previously measured in the 17th century by Ole Roemer. In his 1865 paper, Maxwell stated the immortal words “…it seems we have strong reason to conclude that light itself (including radiant heat and other radiations if any) is an electromagnetic disturbance in the form of waves propagated …according the electromagnetic laws”. This was stated by the Nobel Laureate physicist Richard Feynman in 1964 to be the most stunning conclusion of 19th-century theoretical physics!
  The display cabinet shows a few pages, on loan from The Edinburgh Academy, o
caption: Maxwell's celebrated equations as depicted on the James Clerk Maxwell Statue in Edinburgh
exif: {"Image Artist": "David Peacock", "Image ExifOffset": "2136", "Image XPAuthor": "David Peacock", "Image Padding": "[]", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2017:06:02 21:51:59", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2017:06:02 21:51:59", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "18", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "18", "EXIF Padding": "[]"}