Maxwell: In the Field 4

[Monte Davis]

There was much more to Maxwell than "mathematical force," although in that 
he ranks behind only Newton and Gauss. True, he calculated for two happy, 
exhausting years to prove that Saturn's rings must be made of separate 
particles. True, his work on kinetic theory set physics firmly on the
statistical 
path to quantum mechanics.

But he was also the Jamesie who had never been satisfied with anyone's
answers 
to his everlasting "What's the go of it?", persisting: "But what's the
*particular* 
go of it?" He stoked fires and hauled ice while his wife took meter
readings. (They 
were measuring the viscosity of gases in a tube that ran through the garret
of 
their London home.) He projected a color photograph in 1861, while Matthew 
Brady was still mastering black and white. (It shouldn't have worked,
because 
the plates he called "red" and "green" were in fact insensitive to those 
wavelengths. Unknown to him, they did capture two bands of ultraviolet
light, 
which just happened to give the same effect. A lucky coincidence, if you
like.) 
His stamp would still be on the Cavendish when Rutherford began messing
about 
with atoms.

He lectured at workmen's evening classes, and contributed private essays as 
a luminary of the Cambridge Apostles. Then there was the Britannica, of
course; 
some physicists today cherish copies of that ninth edition as a bibliophile
would 
treasure a First Folio. And he found time for poetry that
ranged from hymn to parody to philosophic doggerel:

Till in the twilight of the Gods,
When earth and sun are frozen clods,
When, all its energy degraded,
Matter to ether shall have faded,
We, that is, all the work we've done
As waves in ether shall forever run
In ever widening spheres through heavens beyond the sun.

************

Now: do you understand about the ether? About the waves? Not if you still
believe 
that history runs by textbook time, one-way.

Look: the full symmetry of the equations, still unfolding, yields two kinds
of waves.
 There are the waves that spread and fade into noise, ever-widening spheres 
around every star, every spark, every quantum jump. The others, the
time-reversed 
mirror images Wheeler and Feynman called the "advanced" waves, are strange,
but 
at least as real as iron filings. They begin as noise at the edge of
space-time and 
converge, strengthening, coming into phase, arriving all at once to be
sucked into the
star, quench the spark, cause (if you like) the quantum jump.

Reflect: does the radio telescope help collapse a galaxy? Does a photon leap
from 
John Clark Maxwell's retina to the shiny toy, bounce to the nearest star,
burrow 
inward to split helium into hydrogen?

*

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