What importance does James clerk maxwell's work have to modern day society?

Answer 1

None at all. He was just a math and science nerd working in a dusty laboratory

in England 150 years ago. Most of the things he invented were nothing but

math formulas and equations. In fact, his four most famous equations weren't

even his ... all four of them were invented by other guys long before Maxwell,

and all he did was to collect up these four equations out of books he read in

the library and play with them all together, like a set of blocks or dolls.

And out of that, he got this weird idea that there must be electromagnetic waves.

And that light could be one kind of them. And if it was, then it would have to move

at 186,000 miles a second. This was so much faster than horses and trains that

almost everybody thought he was a little bit crazy. But the ones that didn't

started doing experiments to find electromagnetic waves.

One guy in Germany figured out how to make them, and after a lot of work,

he could actually make electromagnetic waves on one side of the room and

detect them all the way across the room. That was such a huge accomplishment

that scientists all around the world named the waves after him, and started

calling them "Hertzian waves". But so many other scientists started working

with the same waves that after a few years, they just called them "radio waves".

At the same time, other scientists were figuring out ways to measure the speed

of light, and the better their measurements got, the closer they came to the speed

that Maxwell predicted, and they became more and more convinced that light had to

be electromagnetic waves too.

By now you can see that Maxwell's work had nothing to do with modern society,

except for radio, TV, microwave radios and microwave ovens, weather radar,

GPS, ham radio, CB radio, wi-fi, cellular telephones, garage door openers, traffic

and weather together every 10 minutes, the news from across the country and

around the world while you sit in your easy chair, a stock trader in Chicago

making moves on the New York Stock Exchange in 1/2 a second, chest x-rays,

CAT scans, MRI scans, PET scans, radio astronomy, the leftover fingerprints of

the Big Bang, astronauts talking to Houston from the surface of the Moon, and

Mars rovers receiving their travel instructions from JPL and sending pictures back.

Maxwell discovered that it should be possible, so Hertz tried it and figured out

how to generate radio and send it all the way across his laboratory.

If you can imagine a world that had never known radio, you can see how

plausible it is that nobody would have ever tried it until somebody convinced

them that it must exist. And that it was important to look for it, because heat

and light are all the same phenomenon as radio.

That was Maxwell.