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Maxwell. Fiat Lux

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The ABC’s of Science
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Abstract

With the exception of a poet, a war hero or a rock star, dying young is a terrible mistake. James Clerk Maxwell made this mistake by dying in 1879 at the tender age of 48, and although, for physicists, he still remains one of the most significant figures in his field, his name means little or nothing to most people. It is unlikely, in fact, that anyone knows that our modern technology is due to him: colour televisions, cell phones, digital photography and computers are all devices based on the principles of electromagnetism.

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Further Readings

  • B. Clegg, Professor Maxwell’s Duplicitous Demon (Faber & Faber, London, 2019)

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  • A. Einstein, L. Infeld, The Evolution of Physics (Cambridge University Press, 1878)

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Correspondence to Giuseppe Mussardo .

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Mussardo, G. (2020). Maxwell. Fiat Lux. In: The ABC’s of Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55169-8_13

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