Tờ Physics World số tháng 12, 2006 có bài tưởng niệm James Clerk Maxwell. Năm nay có kỷ niệm 175 năm từ ngày sinh của Maxwell. Tính về các người khổng lồ Vật Lý thì Maxwell đứng ngang với Archimedes, Newton, và Einstein.
(Source: Physicsweb)
Theo bài báo thì Maxwell đã phạm một lỗi lầm nghiêm trọng. Lỗi lầm gì thế? Lỗi lầm là … chết quá sớm.
Unless one is a poet, a war hero or a rock star, it is a mistake to die young. James Clerk Maxwell – unlike Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, the two giants of physics with whom he stands – made that mistake, dying in 1879 at the age of just 48.
Nếu còn sống thì nhiều khả năng là ông đã nghĩ ra thuyết tương đối trước Einstein:
Had he not died so young, Maxwell would almost certainly have developed special relativity a decade or more before Einstein. Moreover, it was through reading Maxwell’s article “Ether” in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that Albert Michelson came to invent the interferometer – a new kind of instrument that he and Edward Morley used in 1887 to discover that the speed of light is the same in all directions.
Còn nữa,
Few would have guessed that this “Scotch laird”, so disarmingly old-fashioned even in 1877, was a scientist whose writings remain astonishingly vibrant in 2006 and the greatest mathematical physicist since Newton. In addition to his work on electromagnetism, Maxwell also contributed to eight other scientific spheres: geometrical optics, kinetic theory, thermodynamics, viscoelasticity, bridge structures, control theory, dimensional analysis and the theory of Saturn’s rings. He also worked on colour vision, producing the first ever colour photograph (see box “A colourful tale”).
Even if his achievements are somewhat overshadowed in the public’s eye by those of Einstein, whose successes were marked by a great series of events last year, it is a measure of Maxwell’s standing that 2006 – the 175th anniversary of this birth – has been dubbed Maxwell Year.