Maxwell: In the Field 1

[Monte Davis]

In the Field

Only a moment ago he asked Mrs. Murdoch to fetch his parents. Now 
all three are standing in the kitchen doorway, but he is watching the 
reflection that dances above the stove, across the ceiling. When he 
notices the adults, he mischievously flashes sunlight in their eyes.

Mr. Maxwell squints and raises a hand to block the glare, but his
voice is indulgent. "What are you up to now, Jamesie?"

"It's the sun, papa. I got it in with this tin plate."

Before the afternoon is over, Jamesie will roll the plate around
the pantry floor until Mrs. Murdoch sends him outside; beat it as
a drum, marching against Napoleon with the Iron Duke; fill it
with pink granite pebbles; empty it again, set it afloat on the
duck pond, and bombard it with pebbles until it is swamped by the
interlacing waves.

*

The antenna turns slowly against the spin of the earth, tracking
a galaxy eight billion light-years away. That far away, that long
ago, the galaxy's core was exploding with unimaginable violence.
Here and now, the radio outburst is almost lost in background
noise. Penzias and Wilson thought that the noise in their antenna
might be caused by pigeon droppings. Instead, it was the echo of
the Big Bang.

**

Where did the Big Bang go? Into waves.

Waves in what?

In the field. The electromagnetic field. Maxwell's field.

What is the field?

It's like the water in ocean waves. It's like the air in sound
waves. It's like the earth in seismic waves. It's like...

What is the field?

It's the sum of all the waves that ever were and all the waves
that will ever be.

Oh.

***

Penzias and Wilson weren't the first to have noise problems. 
Radio astronomy goes back to Karl Jansky, who hoped to trace the
annoying static in long-range radio. Which goes back to Marconi,
who made a revolution out of a laboratory curiosity. Which goes
back to Heinrich Hertz in a darkened room at Karlsruhe, adjusting
the gap between two brass spheres until he saw a spark: the first
radio message. Which goes back to James Clerk Maxwell, who caused
that spark as surely as Hertz's transmitter.

"One cannot escape the feeling," Hertz would write of Maxwell's
equations, "that these formulae have an independent existence and
an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are,
wiser even than their discoverers, that we get more out of them
than was originally put into them."

Poetic license, of course. Scientific piety. Out-and-out
Pythagorean symbol worship .

"A more thorough mathematical study of Maxwell's equations,"
Einstein went on, "shows that new and really unexpected
conclusions can be drawn and the whole theory submitted to a test
on a much higher level..."

Come now; you can't really get more out of them than was
originally put into them. According to information theory, you
can't get even that much.

"A great part of twentieth-century physics and mathematics could
have been created in the nineteenth century," Freeman Dyson
argues, "simply by exploring to the end the mathematical concepts
to which Maxwell's equations naturally lead."

What *are* you up to, Jamesie?

****