More Against the Days

[David Casseres]

On 10/17/06, Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com> wrote:
> There are Reasons I post all this stuff, even if
> they're not always clear, or even predictable, at the
> time.  There are similar Reasons why I'm compelled to
> pick up works on fictional wars or electricity and
> magnetism in 18th century literature, or ... dammit, I
> need this kind of access to the Monroe College Library
> again ...

Electricity and magnetism, yes.  I've been reading James Clerk
Maxwell's 1865 Royal Society paper, "A Dynamical Theory of the
Electromagnetic Field."  Skimming the mathematics, telling myself I
could understand the equations if I spent the time. Ha.

Maxwell is the most under-appreciated scientist of the 19th and 20th
centuries.  Although he remained committed to the idea of the
"aether," it was his equations, indicating that the speed of light was
absolute, not relative, that led Einstein to formulate the relativity
of space and time -- the absoluteness of the law of nature that says
the speed of light is always c, no matter how you measure.

Maxwell's work, unlike Einstein's, was no Gedankenexperiment.  It was
deeply rooted in the experimental work of his predecessors, especially
Michael Faraday.  Thus Einstein could take Maxwell's word for the
experimental basis, and make his stunning thought-experiment.

The 19th century is full of the seeds of the 20th, is what I'm saying.
 And I wonder if the 20th will turn out to be as full of the seeds of
the 21st.  I hope not.