When James Clerk Maxwell, a budding physicist, meets Michael Faraday and encounters Faraday’s lines of force, he is compelled to understand everything he can about electricity and magnetism, anticipating the difficulties of such a journey at a time when the world didn’t have the full story.
We intend to produce a narrative movie about James Clerk Maxwell, an extraordinary scientist who remains relatively unknown. This movie celebrates his accomplishments and brings his story to a larger audience.
Although he has advanced many fields of physics, James Clerk Maxwell’s most significant work is his discovery of the laws of electrodynamics and how he’s inspired generations of physicists.
“One scientific epoch ended and another began with James Clerk Maxwell.” — Albert Einstein
Introduction
The greatest intellectual challenge of the 19th Century was to understand the fundamental nature of electricity and magnetism. In 1820, Andre-Marie Ampere found that electric currents produce magnetic fields. In 1827, Georg Ohm determined the relationship between voltage, current, and resistance in an electrical circuit. In 1831, Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction. These events set the stage for the extraordinary work of James Clerk Maxwell.
Brief Synopsis
At age three, James Clerk Maxwell discovers how to reflect sunlight around their kitchen in Glenlair. At age eight, his mother dies. They move to Edinburgh, where he is ridiculed by his school mates. As a young man, he goes against his father’s wishes and opts for a career in physics. He meets one of his heroes, Michael Faraday, and begins to do original research on electricity and magnetism. His father dies in 1856. Not long afterward, James courts his future wife, Katherine Mary Dewar. He is awarded the Adam’s Prize for his initial work on understanding the stability of Saturn’s rings. In 1858, James and Katherine get married. He continues to do ground-breaking research, and he discovers that light is an electromagnetic wave. Not many people understand the significance of his work. In 1871, he’s asked to take a position as Professor of Experimental Physics at Cambridge. There, he supervises the design and construction of the Cavendish Laboratory. After inspiring many students, James opens the Cavendish Laboratory in 1874, and it goes on to become a huge success.
“From a long view of the history of mankind — seen from, say, ten thousand years from now — there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the nineteenth century will be judged as Maxwell’s discovery of the laws of electrodynamics.” — Richard Feynman