Maxwell's equations: 150 years of light
A century and a half ago, James Clerk Maxwell submitted a long paper to the Royal Society containing his famous equations. Inspired by Michael Faraday's experiments and insights, the equations unified electricity, magnetism and optics. Their far-reaching consequences for our civilisation, and our universe, are still being explored
The chances are that you are reading this article on some kind of electronic technology. You are definitely seeing it via visible light, unless you have a braille or audio converter. And it probably got to you via wifi or a mobile phone signal. All of those things are understood in terms of the relationships between electric charges and electric and magnetic fields summarised in Maxwell's equations, published by the Royal Society in 1865, 150 years ago.
Verbally, the equations can be summarised as something like:
