Before hearing this podcast, what I knew is just that Maxwell is a famous scientist. But never have I thought of, how exactly famous he is, and why his equations are so important in our everyday life. Living in the information era, we use the phone call, WiFi, GPS every day, but seldom do we think of, what brings us all these wonderful conveniences. In this series of podcasts, I found the answer.
As a child with much curiosity, Maxwell always wonders the deep reasons behind the phenomenons, enables him to have these discoveries. According to the podcast, the equations of Maxwell were impossible to confirm through experiments during that time, so it would be so smart and difficult for Maxwell to develop this theory – as the podcast review said, “the touch of genius”. Maxwell’s pull ahead achievement shows on his integration of electricity, magnetism, and light. Before him, there are already many models and equations describing those effects, such as Coulomb’s law, Ampere’s law, Faraday’s law, etc. But Maxwell’s integration as led the world of physics into a new area – he led to the discovery of “field”, showing the beauty of symmetry of the law of physics. The identity of Maxwell’s equations is as important as Newton’s law, it is a foundation and basis of classical physics.