Maxwell's legacy

In this article, the events leading up to Maxwell's most important legacy is discussed in more detail than time permits in the lecture. Interestingly, Maxwell's most important legacy is not the displacement current. It's not even Maxwell's equations. Perhaps the best source of information on Maxwell's life is an 1882 biography by Lewis Campbell and William Garnett. Taken from the biography, a sketch made from a watercolor that was painted from life shows Maxwell's interest in wave phenomena (the violin) even as a child. The ultimate importance of the Maxwell theory is far greater than its immediate achievement in explaining and unifying the phenomena of electricity and magnetism. Its ultimate importance is to be the prototype for all the great triumphs of twentieth-century physics. It is the prototype for Einstein's theories of relativity, for quantum mechanics and for the unified theory of fields and particles that is known as the standard model of particle physics. All these theories are based on the concept of dynamical fields, introduced by Maxwell in 1865.