Will Self’s search for the unknown giant of 19th century science

The author's radio quest to unlock the scientific genius of James Clerk Maxwell ends in frustration, but the journey is revelatory

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 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. In the 19th century, Maxwell's electromagnetic theory unified electricity, magnetism and light in four compact, if redoubtable, equations, which celebrate their 150th anniversary this year.

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.