Maxwell: In the Field 2

[Monte Davis]

At the moment he is staying too late at the Cavendish again. He
watches young Glazebrook measure light refraction in prisms of
Iceland spar. It is the spring of 1879, five years since the
laboratory opened, but Professor Maxwell still supervises
research as carefully as he planned and equipped the building.

The refraction measurements agree with theory to one part in ten
thousand. It's good, sound work, as solid as anything they are
doing in Germany. So much for the doubters at Nature who seemed
to think it shameful for Fellows of Trinity to be messing about
with apparatus!

Pain wrenches at his gut. He murmurs a word of encouragement for
Glazebrook before retreating to his office for some carbonate of
soda in a glass of water. He should go home to Katherine, but
perhaps... yes, just a little more work on the latest proof
sheets of the Cavendish book. How prescient the man was,
anticipating so much of the work of Ohm, Ampere, even Faraday ---
and publishing scarcely any of it, the d---l take him !

In a few months, An Account of the Electrical Researches of the
Honourable Henry Cavendish, F.R.S., between 1771 and 1781 will go
to press. A month after that, Professor Maxwell will die of
cancer of the stomach.

*****

"You know in part, at least, how in this case the promise of
youth was more than fulfilled, and how the man who, but a
fortnight ago, was the ornament of the University, and --- shall
I be wrong in saying it? --- almost the discoverer of a new world
of knowledge, was even more loved than he was admired, retaining
after twenty years of fame that mirth, that simplicity, that
childlike delight in all that is fresh and wonderful, which we
rejoice to think of as the surest accompaniment of scientific
genius. You know, also..."

The Rev. Dr. Butler will prove in stately periods that science,
Christianity, and eminence are compatible. But many in the chapel
are remembering Maxwell's terrier, which would chase its tail
until he gestured, then reverse direction, again and again, until
he brought it to rest like the balance-wheel of a watch. Or of
the "d---l on two sticks," the gyroscopic toy that was never out
of his hands for long. Or of the pins and string he used to draw
a new kind of ellipse when he was still a schoolboy.

******

Edinburgh, 11th March 1846

John Clerk Maxwell, Esq.

My Dear Sir --- I am glad to find today, from Professor Kelland,
that his opinion of your son's paper agrees with mine; namely,
that it is most ingenious, most creditable to him and, we
believe, a new way of considering higher curves with reference to
loci. Unfortunately, these ovals appear to be curves of a very
high and intractable order, so that possibly the elegant method
of description may not lead to a corresponding simplicity in
investigating their properties...

*******

"Wheels within wheels," we say of a complex machination. It was
the baroque epicyclic complexity of it all that doomed Ptolemaic
astronomy. Kepler demolished the starry spheres. Descartes
offered swirling intangible vortexes to replace them, but Newton
needed only the reach of gravity to pull together a new cosmos of
ellipses, parabolas, hyperbolas. He confessed misgivings:
"...that one body may act on another at a distance through a
vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through
which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another,
is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in
philosophical matters a competent facility for thinking
can ever fall into it."

Yet it worked, and promised to make sense of electricity and
magnetism, too. Until Faraday started messing about with
apparatus, and saw lines of force, as real to him as iron
filings, around every charge, magnet, and current. Newton's heirs
were not amused. "I declare," sniffed the Astronomer Royal, "I
can hardly imagine anyone, who knows the agreement between
observation and calculation based on action at a distance, to
hesitate an instant between this simple and precise action, on
the one hand, and anything so vague and varying as lines of force
on the other."