The Unknown Maxwell

One Day Meeting

• 28 March 2025, 09:00 – 17:30
• Cambridge University Engineering Department One Day Meeting

Upcoming event Booking Recommended In-person Lecture Lent Term One Day Meeting

• Event cost: Free
• Disabled access?: Yes
• Booking required: No

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Overview

In the millennium poll, James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) was voted the third greatest physicist of all time – behind Newton and Einstein. But Maxwell’s extraordinary range of interests and achievements extended far beyond his well-known equations for electromagnetism and his thermodynamic relations, and this meeting will explore just a few of the fields in which Maxwell did seminal work. The day will begin with an overview of James Clerk Maxwell’s life and achievements. The talks following will highlight some topics in which current research is revealing interesting developments, but also looking back to Maxwell’s insights in laying the foundations for so much of our contemporary science.

There will be a small exhibition of artefacts including some of Maxwell’s models from the Cavendish collection.

James Clerk Maxwell had strong links with the Cambridge Philosophical Society during his time at Cambridge. He studied mathematics as an undergraduate – initially at Peterhouse, but moving to Trinity before the end of his first term. He graduated in 1854, and shortly afterwards presented his first paper On the transformation of surfaces by bending to the Cambridge Philosophical Society. His career took him to Aberdeen, Edinburgh and King’s College London before returning to Cambridge in 1871 to become the first Professor of Experimental Physics. He was President of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 1875-1877.

09.00	Welcome, introduction	Dr Claire Barlow
09.15	The Unknown Maxwell	Professor Bruce Hunt (University of Texas)
10.00	The Mechanical Origins of Maxwell’s Equations	Professor Malcolm Longair (Cavendish)
10.45-11.00	Introduction to Maxwell artefacts on display in Constance Tipper lecture Theatre	Professor Isobel Falconer (University of St Andrews)
11.00	Tea/coffee in LR4
11.30	Maxwell and the nature of primary colours	Professor John Mollon (Psychology)
12.15	From Maxwell’s fields to quantised light	Professor Peter Knight (Imperial College)
13.00-14.00	Lunch
14.00	Maxwell and the Geometry of Structural Equilibrium	Professor Bill Baker (Cambridge University Honorary Professor of Structural Engineering), Professor Allan McRobie (Engineering)
14.45	150 years of cybernetics: from Maxwell's governor to neuromorphic machines	Professor Rodolphe Sepulchre (Engineering)
15.30	Tea/coffee in LR4
16.00	Saturn’s rings, gravitational instability and the formation of planets	Professor Gordon Ogilvie (DAMTP)
16.45	Thermodynamics and Maxwell's Demon Demystified	Professor John Ellis (Cavendish)
17.30	Closing remarks	Dr Claire Barlow

Tea and coffee will be provided in Lecture Room 4, adjacent, in the morning and afternoon breaks. 

You will need to make your own arrangements for lunch.

You are welcome to buy sandwiches, cakes, snacks and drinks in the Engineering Department’s cafeteria on the second floor, and you may also use this room to eat your own food. 

Biography

Speaker Biographies

The Unknown Maxwell

Professor Bruce J. Hunt is a historian of science at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of three books on the history of 19th century physics and technology and is currently working on a biography of James Clerk Maxwell.

The Mechanical Origins of Maxwell’s Equations

Professor Malcolm Longair graduated in Electronic Physics from Queen's College, Dundee and moved to Cambridge as a research student in the Radio Astronomy Group of the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, supervised by Martin Ryle. His primary research interests are in the fields of high-energy astrophysics and astrophysical cosmology. He was appointed the ninth Astronomer Royal of Scotland in 1980, as well as the Regius Professor of Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, and the director of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh. He was head of the Cavendish Laboratory from 1997 to 2005. He has served on and chaired many international committees, boards and panels, working with both NASA and the European Space Agency. He has received much recognition for his work over the years, including a CBE in the millennium honours list for his services to astronomy and cosmology.

Introduction to Maxwell artefacts

Professor Isobel Falconer is a Professor in the History of Mathematics at St Andrews University. She is interested in the relations between maths and physics in the nineteenth century, and the interaction of both with the cultural context. She was curator of the museum at the Cavendish Laboratory 1978-1980, and has published on James Clerk Maxwell, J J Thomson, J H Poynting and other Cambridge-educated physicists. More recently she has collaborated with Malcolm Longair to select, digitise, and describe, 406 historic images from the Cavendish and made them publicly available at https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/col...; many of these chronicle everyday life in the Cavendish. She was a trustee of the James Clerk Maxwell Foundation 2018-2024.

Maxwell and the nature of primary colours

Professor John Mollon. After taking his first and second degrees in Psychology at Oxford, John Mollon was a Post-doctoral Fellow at Bell Telephone Labs, Murray Hill, where he first began research in colour vision. He became a lecturer in Experimental Psychology at Cambridge in 1976 and subsequently Professor of Visual Neuroscience. His research interests cover visual perception, behavioural genetics, and the physical basis of human memory – as well as the history of these fields. He is a Tillyer Medalist of the Optical Society of America and is President of the International Colour Vision Society.

From Maxwell’s fields to quantised light

Professor Sir Peter Knight is Chair of the UK National Quantum Technology Programme Strategy Advisory Board and has been involved in the creation of the UK programme since its inception, including the creation of the UK Quantum Strategy and the commitment of £2.5bn over the next decade to the field. He is an Emeritus Professor at Imperial College. He was knighted in 2005 for his work in optical physics. Knight was the 2004 President of the Optical Society of America and 2011-2013 President of the Institute of Physics. He was until 2010 chair of the UK Defence Scientific Advisory Council and remains a UK Government science advisor.

Maxwell and the Geometry of Structural Equilibrium

Professor Bill Baker is a structural engineering Consulting Partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) in Chicago. He joined the firm in 1981, became a Partner in 1996 and transitioned to the role of a Consulting Partner in 2019. In addition to his professional practice, he teaches at MIT and the University of Cambridge where he is the Emeritus Honorary Professor of Structural Engineering Design.

Bill is best known for the development of the “buttressed core” structural system for the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest manmade structure. His expertise also extends to long-span roof structures and specialty structures such as the Broadgate Exchange House and Broadgate Tower in London. He has also collaborated with numerous artists, including James Carpenter, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, James Turrell, Janet Echelman, and Jaume Plensa.

He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering and an International Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He has honorary doctorates from the University of Stuttgart, Heriot-Watt University, the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Missouri.

Professor Allan McRobie is Professor of Structural Engineering at Cambridge University. After his first degree (Physics, Bristol) Allan retrained as an engineer, with Masters degree in Water Engineering and in Structural Engineering (Southampton). There followed seven years in industry in Australia, undertaking the design of large-scale civil engineering structures, before a return to academia (UCL) to undertake research into dynamical systems. Since joining Cambridge in 1993, Allan’s research interests have included structural design, stability and dynamics, with specific focuses on aeroelasticity and extreme events. Since 2016, Allan has been working on extensions to Maxwell’s theories of structural mechanics, culminating in the co-editing – with Bill Baker – of a book, The Geometry of Equilibrium: James Clerk Maxwell and 21st Century Structural Mechanics, (Cambridge University Press).

150 years of cybernetics: from Maxwell's governor to neuromorphic machines

Professor Rodolphe Sepulchre is professor of engineering at the University of Cambridge (UK) since 2013 and at the KU Leuven (Belgium) since 2023.

He is a fellow of IFAC (2020), IEEE (2009), and SIAM (2015). He was elected at the Royal

Academy of Belgium in 2013. He received the IEEE CSS Antonio Ruberti Young Researcher Prize in 2008 and the IEEE CSS George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award in 2020. He is Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Control Systems. He is a recipient of two ERC advanced grants (Switchlets (2015-2021) and SpikyControl (2023-2028)).

Saturn’s rings, gravitational instability and the formation of planets

Professor Gordon Ogilvie is Professor of Mathematical Astrophysics and head of the Astrophysics group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge. His theoretical research in astrophysical fluid dynamics and magnetohydrodynamics has applications to astrophysical discs (e.g. around young stars and black holes) and (exo)planetary systems. Earlier in his career he worked in Germany and the USA, as well as at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. He is currently lecturing Electromagnetism to mathematicians and teaching Mathematics to natural scientists at Clare College.

Thermodynamics and Maxwell's Demon Demystified

Professor John Ellis studied natural sciences as an undergraduate at St John's College, Cambridge, followed by a PhD on the use of helium atom scattering to probe surface structure and dynamics. He held a research Fellowship at St John’s College before moving to work in the group of J.P. Toenies at the Max-Planck-Institut für Strömungsforschung in Göttingen. Here he helped develop the technique of quasi elastic helium scattering as a probe of surface diffusion, and his research since then has focused on exploiting this technique and developing instrumentation to enable a much wider application of this technique. He returned to the Cavendish with a Lloyd’s of London Tercentenary Fellowship, followed by an EPSRC Advanced Fellowship at University of East Anglia. When the physics department there closed he took the position of Assistant Director of

Research in the Cavendish. He is a Fellow and Director of Studies for Natural Sciences (physical) at Gonville and Caius College.

He has lectured undergraduate physics in a range of areas with particular interest in Part I courses. With the thermodynamics lectures he has sought to develop a coherent account of the foundations of the subject that eliminate the usual paradoxes and Ansätze. He also lectured the 1A Fields course for a number of years, and tried to establish whether one can actually teach Maxwell’s equations, as the syllabus required, at that level.

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