Tag Archives: Self Drives: Maxwell’s Equations

The search for James Clerk Maxwell

The Brits really know how to celebrate an anniversary. In this case it’s the 150th anniversary of James Clerk Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory unifying electricity, magnetism, and light. (My Nov. 27, 2015 posting the first piece here featuring the anniversary and it describes the theory in more detail than you’ll find here.)

As part of the celebration there’s a five-episode series titled: Self Drives: Maxwell’s Equations being broadcast on BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 4. Stephen Curry writes about the series in a Dec. 9, 2015 posting on the Guardian science blogs (Note: Links have been removed),

There’s a potent antidote to the “Isn’t this amazing?” school of science communication and it’s called Will Self. In Self Drives: Maxwell’s Equations, which was broadcast recently [you can hear it as a podcast by visiting this site] on BBC Radio 4, the curious curmudgeon takes science to task once again as he goes in search of the mathematical and physical genius behind James Clerk Maxwell.

Over five short episodes, Self’s querulous quest takes him from Maxwell’s birthplace in Edinburgh to his family home in Glenlair, to the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank and the Diamond synchrotron near Oxford, and finally to Cambridge, where Maxwell studied mathematics in his youth and returned in his latter years as one of the nation’s most accomplished scientists to head the university’s Cavendish physics laboratory. Accompanying Self along the way is Akram Khan, the same physics professor who joined the errant writer on his earlier orbit of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. I would have dubbed Khan Sancho Panza to Self’s Don Quixote but for this particular expedition the characters are reversed. It is Khan who wishes to see the poetry of science, while Self is happier to be grounded in prosaic and flawed reality. At CERN he refused truculently to worship in the cathedral of particle physics, stymied in equal measure by the difficulty of the subject matter and the boosterism of its scientific proponents. Here again the journey is mostly one of disappointment and frustration.

But not for the listener. The quest is far from fruitless, and nor is it lacking in emotional and intellectual force. Self’s documentary is not straight biography – you will find out more about Maxwell’s life and work from Wikipedia – but he has a different target in mind. …

Here’s the pair of explorers,

Will Self, Akram Khan and Maxwell’s infamous equations. Photograph: Laurence Grissell/BBC

Will Self, Akram Khan and Maxwell’s infamous equations. Photograph: Laurence Grissell/BBC

It’s good writing and an intriguing look into communicating science in a way that’s not quite so reverent and/or kid friendly as we tend to be in Canada.