Maxwell was born and raised in Edinburgh (Scotland).
- Maxwell's equations.
Click here for their mathematical refinements.
- Maxwell Relations in thermodynamics.
Click here for a two-dimensional
organization of those formulas (from a note taken from John A. Wheeler's
lectures on thermodynamics). I like Wheeler's way of expressing physical
ideas. He was fond of using cartoons.
Marconi was a very handsome man, and he had many girlfriends. - Maxwell and consumer Electronics. Maxwell found electromagnetic
radiation and electromagnetic waves, by writing formulas and making
them consistent with one another.
The question is how it became the beginning of today's wireless world. Click here for early days of wireless communication.
- Photons from Maxwell, Minkowski, Einstein, and then to Wigner.
Click here for photons
in the quantum world.
- Maxwell and Columbia University. Columbia University's physics building is named after Michael Pupin. Who was he?
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Maxwell's statue in Edinburgh. I was there (June 2013). |
Maxwell's contribution to physics and thus to the world civilization is well known to us. Let us summarize.
Who else came from Scotland?
David Hume
His philosophy is not restricted to physics. Immanuel Kant developed his philosophy based on his experiences in the city of Koenigsberg. Click here for a story. Kant is an important person in physics. Einstein was a Kantianist before developing his own philosophy of physics. For further information about Hume, you are invited to his Wiki page. | ||||
Adam Smith
He developed the philosophy of money: to make and manage money by thinking. To research scientists these days, the degree of achievements is measured in terms of the amount of research grants from funding agencies. The termination of funding means a death sentence on research life. Is this the absolute rule? I am very happy to offer an exception to this rule. In 1974, the (U.S.) National Science Foundation stopped supporting my research program, but I have been more productive since then. This is my 40th year to publish papers without NSF support. I usually make three or four trans-Atlantic (or Pacific) trips per year. I also know how to run conferences while making profits. Many people wonder how I manage these without funding. I am also wondering. There definitely is a money issue. Some people say (I do not) money is higher than God, but I can say that the brain is more powerful than money. Perhaps this is what Adam Smith wanted to say while formulating his philosophy of money. | ||||
Alexander Graham Bell
His interest was not restricted to telephones. He was interested in voice-recording devices. He was also interested in developing airplanes. He was as crazy as Thomas Edison, if not more. Here is the Wikipedia page for him.
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Colin Maclaurin
Maclaurin invented the series expansion of f(x) in terms of f(x) and its derivatives at x = 0 . Brook Taylor later found that this processes can be done not only at x = 0 but also at other values of x . This is of course known as the Taylor series.
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Charles Darwin
The point is that Darwin did not pull out his theory from the blue sky. He travelled around the world to see various species and their environments. His theory was strongly opposed by church authorities. This caricature tells how Darwin was ridiculed by the society. Even now, there are many places where his evolution theory is not allowed in class rooms.
Click on this Wikipedia page for more detailed stories. | ||||
John Knox
On the other hand, the wave of reform movements was coming from the European continent. John Knox (1513-1573) was a Catholic clergy man with discontent with the church bureaucracy. He went to Switzerland and got reform ideas from John Calvin (1509-1564) , who a reformist along with Martin Luther (1483-1546) of Germany. Knox came back to Scotland, and started preaching in the Calvinist way at the Cathedral of St. Giles located at the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. His way of believing in Jesus became Presbyterianism, and he was the first Presbyterian pastor. These days, Presbyterians throughout the world constitute the largest Protestant denomination. | ||||
King James
He was thus a very important figure for the entire land of Britain,
and also to the new land of America. During his reign, many British
immigrants came to America and settled down at a town in Virginia
known today as
From the scholarly point of view, his most important accomplishment
was the translation into English of the Bible. He used his king's
power to assemble all Bible scholars to do the job. The first English
edition of the Bible is known today as the King James Version.
It is also known that he formulated the idea of translation while he
was the king of Scotland before coming to London. During the 19th
Century, the King James Version was rewritten in improved English.
This task was carried out in the area of Edinburgh known as the
Royal Mile. There, copies of the English Bible were mass-produced
and supplied to English-speaking countries throughout the world,
including the United States and Canada.
I was there in June of 2013, and here is
one of the photos taken there.
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John Witherspoon
He set up a very high ethical code for the faculty and students. My PhD diploma (written in Latin) says "this person is morally perfect." Witherspoon was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. His college building (now Nassau Hall of Princeton University) once housed the government of the United States during the Independence War. Before he came, the college consisted of one building, but he had to add a number of new buildings. In order to take into account of those buildings and the college environment, he invented the word "campus." The campus is a very important concept to all of us. You may click here to see the campus of Princeton University. | ||||
Andrew Carnegie
I heard about Andrew Carnegie in Korea before I started thinking about going to the college built by him. I was always interested in how he became such a great man after coming to the United States from Scotland with two empty hands. In June of 2013, I was fortunate enough to visit his hometown called Dunfermline 20-minute train-ride away from Edinburgh. I took some photos there.
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John Ross and John MacIntyre
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copyright@2013 by Y. S. Kim.
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- Click here for his home page.
- His Einstein page.
- His Princeton page.
- His Style page.
I received my PhD degree from Princeton in 1961, seven years after high school graduation in 1954. This means that I did much of the ground work for the degree during my high school years.