Original subtitles

Our planet is filled with signals invisible to the naked eye.

One, zero.

But space itself can be just as noisy.

This is Cambridge University's radio telescope observatory.

It's used to examine the far reaches of space.

To answer questions about the very origin of our universe.

These magnificent dishes are detecting signals from radiation left over from the big bang.

But they're not optical telescopes in the sense of looking through an eyepiece and seeing how the planet or the star.

These dishes are detecting radio waves.

These telescopes allow us to see the unseen.

Extraordinary images like these are made possible thanks to radio waves, microwaves and gamma rays.

The thing is all these waves are connected.

There are all different types of something we call electromagnetic radiation.

Visible like the light that you and I can see is just a tiny portion of this broader spectrum of waves.

We use waves to probe the outer reaches of our universe.

But we use them for so much more.

In fact, electromagnetic waves are at the heart of modern technology.

We use them every day and everything from medicine to communications.

Our mastery of these waves was made possible when one man published a set of equations in 1865.

A man called James Clark Maxwell.

His name is barely known to the public.

And yet he's probably the finest scientist Scotland's ever produced.

And 150 years after his greatest discovery, I'm setting out to explore the story of the man and his work.

The

Excuse me, can I ask you a question? Do you recognise this person?

No? Do you know who he is? Alexander Greenville?

No idea.

It looks like a banker and economist maybe.

James Clark Maxwell.

It's no idea.

James Clark Maxwell.

Never heard of him.

Albert Einstein.

You're so close.

James Clark Maxwell.

Name Ringabout?

Max Welles equations.

I don't know what they're about.

I've heard of him.

Right, you do physics?

I do physics.

Okay, James Clark Maxwell, unless you should test.

I just failed physics.

Is it statue?

Is it statue?

That's statue.

You probably passed that quite regularly.

Quite regularly.

So it's quite an embarrassment to say.

No, but no one.

I've been asking everyone here.

James Clark Maxwell.

No one knows who he is.

Any ideas?

This is a statue of James Clark Maxwell.

And you're virtually no one around here knows who he is.

But I don't blame them because Maxwell seems to have slipped through the cracks of history.

At least as far as the public's concerned.

So who was he?

James Clark Maxwell was a 19th century Scottish scientist.

He's this genius to work across a wide range of subjects.

Astronomy, physiology, color, optics, thermodynamics, electricity and magnetism.

He touched on all of these and changed many of them beyond recognition.

He caused a revolution in physics and gave us a laws for one of the four fundamental forces of the universe.

Einstein kept a picture of Maxwell on the wall of his study.

And one said, I stand on the shoulders of James Clark Maxwell.

It's a sentiment shared by many physicists today.

Maxwell did electricity and magnetism.

What Isaac Newton did for gravity.

He's one of my great heroes.

He's one of the greatest scientists ever ever going to encounter.

He's on the par with Einstein, with Newton, with Archimedes.

He transformed our way in which we understand the world.

He's probably the greatest scientist Scotland's ever produced.

We're still living in the shadow of his achievements.

And yet no one knows who he is.

Even me, a Scot and a scientist just got this big notion of what he did.

But I want to change that.

I want to rediscover James Clark Maxwell.

Born in Edinburgh in 1831, Maxwell was the only child in a land-doning family from Galloway.

The scientific revolution of the previous centuries was changing our view of the world.

But modern science was still in its infancy.

The 19th century would see grown breaking discoveries.

And Maxwell would be at the heart of it, compelled by a probing mind.

His inquisitive nature was obvious, even in childhood.

When he was a boy, the Zortrub was a new invention.

And the young Maxwell loved them.

It's kind of hypnotic.

In a sense, these are the forerunners of movies and television.

You can imagine Kenton in the 19th century has just been mesmerised by them.

Most of it would have been happy just to sit back and enjoy the show,

but Maxwell wanted to know how they worked.

The moving figures that are trick of the eye stop the drums spinning

and you can see the simple sketches that help create the moving image.

This simple illusion captivated Maxwell.

As a child he would build his own Zortrub strips to entertain his family

and to understand how they worked.

This desire to understand the world around them continued into adulthood.

Age is 14.

He produced a paper on geometric shapes that showed such mathematical ingenuity it was published.

And then read at the Royal Society of Edinburgh,

by an established professor as James was deemed too young.

As a teenager he conducted homemade experiments into light and colour.

And by the time he arrived at Cambridge University, age 19,

he'd already published three mathematical papers.

From the age of 14,

Maxwell had been using mathematics to explain how the world worked.

It was a talent he would rely on for many of his discoveries.

And it was key to establishing his scientific reputation.

Because while still in his 20s, he used maths to solve a riddle

that had puzzled scientists for centuries.

Saturn's rings are vivid bands surrounding one of our solar systems giant planets.

We become accustomed to their beauty.

But in previous centuries they were an enigma.

Galileo forced through them in 1610 and they immediately fascinated astronomers.

Sometimes the rings were hidden.

At other times clearly visible in the night sky.

By the mid-19th century we knew the rings were composed of at least two vast concentric circles.

Over 250,000 kilometres in diameter.

But what were the rings made of?

And why did they stay in place?

In 1855 a Cambridge college published an all pre-competition to answer those very questions.

But the answer would have to be accompanied by a full mathematical proof.

Maxwell's response would enemies stripes as one of Britain's top physicists.

There were three possible explanations for Saturn's rings.

One possibility was that the rings were solid rock or ice.

Another that they were entirely fluid.

A third explanation said the rings were made up of lots of individual particles that circled Saturn.

As the rings were over a billion kilometres away, proving which explanation was right seemed impossible.

So how did Maxwell go about kind of disentangling those options?

Well with great difficulty.

But of course what's really striking, what's very impressive is that he did it using pure maths.

And you wouldn't perhaps instantly think that this was a problem you could tackle.

That way you think well the way to do it is to just build a big telescope and have a look.

But the mathematics that Maxwell brought to bear on this allowed him to look at these three cases

and to basically decide which one of them was the correct answer.

So if we take first of all the case of completely solid ring,

there's a particular mathematical equation that describes that case.

The distance from the centre of the planet to the centre of the rings, that's a big R here.

The maths is incredibly complicated and as a geologist I'm a bit out of my depth.

But I understand the basic point.

Maxwell reduced the physical world to mathematical symbols and then used maths to predict what was happening around Saturn.

Maxwell said that a solid ring was possible, but only if most of the material was bunched together on one side of the planet.

And of course if you look through a telescope it doesn't look like that, so that morning it discarded back to the drawing board.

Maxwell then assumed that the rings were fluid.

He came up with an equation to describe how that might work.

What if he goes with these complicated mathematics?

He found that if the rings were fluid, physical forces acting on them would eventually break them up into lumps.

So he discounted this possibility.

And that leaves the third possibility, which is that the rings consist of a very large number of independently moving particles.

Particles that are all orbiting Saturn on their own.

And what he boiled all of that down to was an equation to tell you how many particles you would need in order to have the system stable.

And sure enough, this seemed to work.

So it wasn't just that he'd shown that the other two possibilities were wrong, but that this third possibility did actually work as well.

Well I find staggering as just a notion that you can just use numbers to predict something.

You've got absolutely no knowledge about that right now.

Sure, I think for me that's almost a watershed moment in how we do physics because it lead the foundations for really how we do physics today.

Because there's many examples of everything from the Higgs boson to studying distant galaxies where you can make theoretical predictions.

And it might be years or decades or even centuries before you can fully test those predictions.

But hey, it works.

We're just zooming in on the ring plane.

That's great, isn't it?

Yeah, amazing.

Here they are!

They're in the ring!

Look at that.

What do you think Maxwell would have given to have seen this?

Oh, I'm shooting a bit of love there.

Almost 130 years after Maxwell's prediction, we captured images that proved his theory beyond data.

In 1977, an ambitious NASA launched the Voyager probe.

And three years later, it sent home sensational images of Saturn's rings.

In 2009, the Cassini probe confirmed those findings.

Saturn's rings were made of millions of icy rocks.

In recognition of his work, a division between the rings, known as the Maxwell Gap.

But his maths has been applied beyond Saturn.

This image from the Taurus constellation shows a young son at the heart of a huge cloud of dust and rocks.

As the clouds circles a star, dark bands reveal areas where rocks are clumping together to form planets.

We're witnessing the birth of a solar system.

And the maths we use to understand this process is the same as Maxwell's work on Saturn's rings.

Math is a powerful tool that physicists use to understand and to predict a universe.

And Maxwell was a master of it.

In solving the problems of Saturn's rings, Maxwell had put a mark on down.

He wanted scientific establishment to take him seriously.

And they did.

When Maxwell delivered his paper, it was the only one that the Cambridge Committee received.

No one else came up with an explanation.

Overnight, Maxwell became known as one of Britain's great theoretical physicists.

This wasn't a surprise to those who knew him, because his teenage precociousness had been followed by groundbreaking experiments as an undergraduate.

So perhaps it's no wonder that Maxwell was made professor here at Aberdeen's Marshall College at the tender age of 25.

His star was on the rise.

His career may have been taking off, but this was a difficult time for Maxwell.

An only child, he'd been extremely close to his parents.

But his mother had died when he was eight.

And just a few months before Maxwell arrived in Aberdeen, he lost his father.

Maxwell expressed his grief in a letter to a friend.

But the passage gives a revealing insight into his humanity and the deep feelings he had for family and friends.

Either be a machine and see nothing but phenomena, or else try and be a man.

Feeling your life interwoven as it is with many others and strengthened by them, whether in life or death.

Maxwell's move to Aberdeen meant he was far from friends, and amongst colleagues twice his age, he threw himself into his work.

Whether it was his industry or his solitude, Maxwell came to the attention of the college principal, Reverend Daniel Duhr.

Duhr befriended his new professor, and Maxwell became a regular visitor for dinner, which is how he met the principal's daughter.

And then, the teacher came to the attention of the teacher and he was a little bit different.

Maxwell's relationship with Kathryn reveals the character of the man beyond his scientific genius.

Deeply affectionate, he had a lively sense of humor and a passion for poetry.

As the relationship blossomed, Maxwell plucked up the courage to ask Kathryn to share the lives together, and his marriage proposal included a poem.

Maxwell married Kathryn in 1858, and throughout their lives they remained devoted to each other.

He was a very young man, and he was a very young man.

He was a very young man, and he was a very young man.

He was a very young man, and he was a very young man.

Maxwell married Kathryn in 1858, and throughout their lives they remained devoted to each other.

She would be a valued assistant in many of his future experiments, and even became a willing guinea pig for one of his great obsessions.

Strange as it may seem, in Maxwell's time we didn't really know what color was, or why we saw color at all.

In the 17th century Isaac Newton had given us food for thought.

By using a prism he had split sunlight into separate colors, the familiar colors of the rainbow.

He showed that what we perceive as white light is actually a mixture of different colors.

Newton said that every color we see was a result of mixing the colors we see in the rainbow.

He tried and failed to establish the rules of mixing.

150 years later we weren't much wiser.

Maxwell was interested in color and why we perceive it throughout his life.

And his first real breakthrough came as a Cambridge student.

Artists seemed to be ahead of scientists on this.

For centuries they had been creating a vast palette of colors, often by just mixing red, blue and yellow.

Artists refer to these three as the primary colors,

and using them they could create entirely different colors.

So if a painter was mixing red and yellow he would get orange.

And if he was mixing blue and red he'd get purple.

But if they were mixing blue and yellow then they would get green.

As a student Maxwell read about the work of Thomas Young.

Young thought that there was something significant about the number of primary colors.

But he also thought biology had a role to play.

Young argued that the human eye had three receptors in it, each one sensitive to a particular color.

He argued that the brain, what like a painter, combined in messages from each receptor to build up this perception of color.

It was a stroke of intuitive genius, which is not of any proof.

Young thought that these receptors corresponded to the painter's primary colors.

Taken by Young's three color theory, Maxwell wanted to test it.

He devised a way to mix the primary colors with mathematical precision.

He then tested those mixers on a wide range of people.

To see if they all perceived the same color.

And he did this with a deceptively simple tool.

So this looks old, what's this then?

This is Maxwell's original color for you, which we are very pleased to have in the laboratory.

So that's the original thing, that's what he made.

This original thing, that's it. It's slightly beaten up.

He used a lot. And that's because Maxwell used this to test out the mixing of lights among all his friends when he was here in Trinity College.

It is pretty antique, as you can see, but the idea is you put different amounts of the color papers here,

and then when you rotate them, then they mix up.

And this works because of the typical time that the eye can respond to the twenty-third of a second.

And so if it goes faster, the eye will interpret this as the mixture of the colors.

And this is a motorized version of it.

This is a motorized version of it, and we can actually demonstrate how the color mixing works with this rather pretty demonstration here.

We're going to mix red and blue.

We'll rotate it rapidly, and then we will see which color we produce.

Just like his childhood zoetrope, Maxwell's color, if we would spin so fast, it would trick the human body.

So if you were going to bring up that light, that's what he asked.

Instead of moving figures, he'd be mixing colors just as artists did, but with mathematical precision.

When he mixed red and blue, he got the same color artist did when they mixed paint.

That's kind of magenta. Yes. It's a sort of magenta color.

If young was right and there were receptors in our eye that responded to the artist's primary colors,

then perhaps mixing red, yellow and blue and equal measure would produce white.

But it didn't. So Maxwell tried different combinations.

We can begin now to reveal green as well as blue here.

If we just do a little bit of fiddling around with these discs, we'll be able to get equal amounts of red, green and blue.

We can then see what colors we observe.

It's white. It's the only color you'd call that white.

So this is a beautiful demonstration of the fact that the primary lights, and then notice the word light, not pigments,

the primary lights are red, blue and green.

And you can create any color of light by suitable mixture of different proportions of these.

What happens in paintings, pigments absorb light, whereas this is a mitting light.

So the upshot of all of this was that Maxwell was able to produce a rather beautiful color triangle diagram,

which could indicate how you would create any color by mixing the three primary colors.

Maxwell's color triangle allowed him to pick a specific color and work out how much of each primary color we've needed to reproduce it.

This was made possible by his mathematical precision and systematic testing.

Maxwell's work swept aside a sea of confusion.

He vindicated Young's theory and demonstrated that we see colors and paints differently to the way we see colors and light.

He established the primary colors for light as red, blue and green.

He realized the receptors in her eyes were sensitive to those three.

And then by mixing them, we perceived a vast range of colors.

A few years later, he provided a stunning display that he was right.

In 1861, Maxwell was invited to the Royal Institution in London to give a lecture on color vision.

But he didn't want to just talk about the principles. He wanted to demonstrate them to his audience.

What he did was astonish them.

Maxwell took three photographs of the same object.

Each photo had a different filter on it. One was red, one was green, and one was blue.

That gave Maxwell three photographic plates that he could use to project an image with.

When Maxwell projected the image from the red photograph onto the wall, he got a red picture.

In an age when photography was black and white, this was interesting, but hardly revolutionary.

And if he'd project all three images onto the wall at the exact same spot, something special happens.

The audience were looking at the world's first color photograph.

They were stunned.

Maxwell had chosen the perfect subject for his picture, a brightly colored tartan ribbon.

By layering red, green, and blue images on top of each other, Maxwell established the possibility of creating color photographs.

150 years later, we used this method daily because this three-color principle is used in color TV, computer screens, even mobile phones.

The colors we see in our screens, however big or small, are created by carefully mixing the primary colors.

Maxwell's work on color provides the basis for our present understanding of color vision.

He even proposed an explanation for why some people were colorblind.

He said the receptors and their eyes were faulty, and that this radically altered how they perceived color.

Three weeks after his color show, Maxwell was elected to the Royal Society for his work on Saturn's rings and on color.

He was now counted amongst the finest physicists in Britain, and he was 29.

Despite his success a year earlier, Maxwell had found himself out of a job.

When Marshall College merged with Aberdeen University, he had lost out to an older professor.

Out of work, Maxwell and Catherine took a trip to the country to somewhere very special to James.

A quiet place, hidden deep in Galloway, just west of them frees.

A place called Glen Lear, his family home.

Maxwell's family had been established in the area for centuries, and Glen Lear was a working estate.

He was born in Edinburgh, but James had spent an idyllic childhood here.

Playing in the fields, swimming in the stream, running through the woods, nature truly was his playground.

And that fostered the curiosity about how the natural world worked.

For the first decade of his life, Maxwell was home schooled by his mother.

She encouraged his inquisitiveness. Look up through nature, she said, up to nature's god.

Glen Lear remained an important place to Maxwell throughout his life.

It was somewhere that rooted him, a safe haven, a home.

And the current owner of Glen Lear knows just how that fuels.

So what was that like, grown up at Glen Lear?

Well, I was a ten year old little boy, and I came here.

And I had the run of the place. My dad was quite an old chap.

And he and my mother, and I was an only child, they were elderly.

So they didn't really keep an eye on me.

My childhood must have almost mirrored his.

Although I was slightly older.

But I mean, a lot of his stuff is theoretical. It's kind of just thinking, difficult thinking.

This seems a good place for theoretical thinking.

Yes, yes. And we have loads of professors who visit here.

And nearly all of them stand here and they look at that view and they say, I know how he could do it.

Because it just inspires you.

Try to encapsulate Maxwell. What is he for you?

What do you think of him more than anything else?

What appealed to me about Maxwell is how normal he was as a boy.

That he loved outside. He loved the open air.

He loved all the creatures.

And the gardens and the trees you see around here, thanks to Maxwell.

But it's that emotional attachment in your field, Tim.

Yes, it's the way he loved it here. Like I love it here.

I've been offered lots and lots of money to sell this place.

There's no way they're going to get me out except in the box.

Like Duncan, Maxwell felt a strong connection to Glenn Lear.

His proposal, Paulium, to Catherine, had been about sharing their lives here.

They'd even honeymooned on Glenn Lear.

When they returned here in 1860, it wasn't just a holiday.

On the death of his father, Maxwell had inherited over a thousand acres of farmland.

Dozens of working people relied on decisions he made.

There were fields to sow, animals to tend, buildings to construct.

He raised funds to build a church and was keen to improve local schooling.

It was a responsibility he took seriously.

And every summer, Maxwell and Catherine returned here to oversee the estate.

And recaptured some of the childhood peace he'd found here.

But Maxwell wouldn't stay at Glenn Lear.

He wanted to be in the thick of scientific research, and that made the University.

After a rejection from Edinburgh, he accepted a position at King's College London.

Whilst there, he would produce his finest work, and unravel one of the great mysteries of his age.

Maxwell arrived in London at the end of 1860, and assumed teaching duties immediately.

While there, he focused on a subject that had captured his attention many years before.

Ever since his early days at Cambridge, Maxwell has been interested in electricity.

After it was suggested, it was an area to look out by a friend.

That friend's advice was simple.

If Maxwell wanted to learn something about electricity, he needed to know Michael Faraday.

Faraday was a self-taught scientist who was revolutionising her understanding of electricity and magnetism.

Maxwell's relationship with him was one of the most fruitful in 19th century science.

We'd known about electricity and magnetism since ancient times.

Most people had experienced the power of electricity through terrifying lightning storms.

And we'd used magnetism in ships' compasses for centuries.

They were considered completely separate things for most of our history.

But in the early 19th century, scientists like Faraday were beginning to see a mysterious connection between the two.

Deep in the heart of the Royal Institution, Faraday conducted experiments to understand how they were linked.

In one experiment, a copper wire carrying electricity somehow provoked a nearby electric car.

In one experiment, a copper wire carrying electricity somehow provoked a nearby compass to move.

In another, Faraday tried to do the opposite.

Use a magnet to generate electricity.

Which led him to invent the electric generator, which is an example, we have a permanent magnet and a coil of wire.

So the wire is wrapped around this bed in sand?

The wire is wrapped around a cylinder and you push and pull the magnet in and out of the cylinder to generate an electric car.

What's the Christmas lights for?

That's to show the electricity's passing.

Faraday did not use light-emitting diodes.

I think he should have done. That was his great mistake.

All electricity power stations throughout the world use as principle of generator electricity that Faraday discovered down here in 1831.

Faraday had generated electricity simply by moving a magnet through a coiled wire, a discovery that would forever be associated with his name.

But he was left with perplexing questions.

There was no physical contact between the electric wire and the magnetic needle that moved.

Nor between the moving magnet and the copper coil.

They were affecting each other through seemingly thin air.

But how could that be?

What Faraday thought was happening was that there were lines of force coming out at the end of the magnet, which were then cutting the wire within the coil to generate to move electricity around the coil.

The idea of mysterious lines coming out of the magnet to generate electricity may have seemed outlandish, but Faraday had a simple experiment that could be used to make it a little bit more efficient.

It could prove that existence.

So it took a very powerful magnet, placed some paper on it, sprinkled arm parlings over it.

Just to represent the lines of force.

It never fails to impress that.

Of the magnet and you can see the three-dimensional structure.

These are coming up here and swinging around and coming down into this.

Faraday made permanent examples of this and sent them around to all his mates in Europe to show that space has structure as a very strong argument for his field theory.

Faraday thought there was an invisible force field at work here.

Well, it literally a field. It still brings the word field into science.

It's invisible, as you say.

So this is why this is just a representation.

It shows the existence of those invisible lines.

Faraday's iron-file is experiment revealed the existence of an invisible field stretching out into thin air.

These fields, he thought, were responsible for the experimental results he'd seen.

Despite having physical proof, Faraday lacked a mathematical description of how the field was generated, or why it affected things around it.

Without a mathematical proof, many 19th century scientists dismissed the theory as speculative.

But Maxwell had followed Faraday's work for years and set out to prove him right.

Maxwell had plenty of time to mull over the problem.

The walk from his Kensington home to King's College was an eight-mile round trip every day.

During the walk, he allowed his mind to wander.

On those walks, and at work, he'd company.

Faraday Maxwell always had a dog, and he always called it the same name.

From childhood onwards, every dog was called Toby.

And Toby, whichever one it was, really left his side.

Toby was a constant companion at home and in the lab.

It's a sign of Maxwell's eccentricity that he would talk to Toby.

He said he liked his company.

During his walks to and from work, Maxwell, perhaps Toby,

brooved over the mysterious relationship between electricity and magnetism.

His aim was to provide a mathematical explanation for the link between the two.

After years of thinking, and who knows how many miles walking, he came up with a set of equations

that describe the relationship between electricity and magnetism.

Equations that would change our lives forever.

Sorry, Frank, but this is just gobbling it to me.

Just look at that trying to make sense of it.

It's not much easier for me.

That's what he wrote first of all.

Looking at these, they probably mean little more to me than to you.

But 20 years later, they were written in a simpler form, which is the way that this form is from here.

That looks more manageable.

But I'll expect a few.

Could you tick us through it then?

The first one says that if you've got an electric charge,

it spreads an electric field out of all over space.

Just like his work on Saturn's rings, each equation is a mathematical description of something observed in the real world.

So the first equation described how a static electric charge generates an electric field.

And the second, that magnetic poles always come in pairs.

The third equation describes how a changing magnetic field generates an electric field.

And the fourth equation, that an electric current surrounds itself with a magnetic field.

But Maxwell realized there was something missing.

Maxwell's genius was to realize that each of these equations is fine until he put them together.

And then he realized something was missing and it was in this final equation.

He said, there has to be another term.

And what this extra piece says is if an electric field is changing, it will surround itself with a magnetic field.

Which is like the sort of mirror of this equation, which says if a magnetic field is changing, it will surround itself with a magnetic field.

So just take these two together and just think about it for a second.

If I've got a magnetic field changing, it surrounds itself with an electric.

If the electric is changing, it surrounds itself with a magnetic.

And if that is changing, it will surround itself again with an electric and so on.

Faraday to Maxwell, electric to magnetic, back and forth, back and forth.

So there's a coupling basically between the two.

Maxwell's equations were saying that electric and magnetic fields were inextricably linked.

Changes in one created changes in the other.

It helped explain so much.

When Faraday moved these magnets, he changed the position of the magnetic field.

And this triggered an electric field which caused electricity to flow through the wire.

And when electricity passed through a wire, it wrapped a magnetic field around it, causing the compass needle to move.

Using pure maths, Maxwell had unified electricity and magnetism, and shown there were two aspects of the same thing.

A single electromagnetic field.

This alone would have guaranteed Maxwell's entry to the scientist Hall of Fame.

He could have rested on his laurels.

But whether it was his natural curiosity or the long walks with Toby, he didn't stop there.

He used his equations to test another of Faraday's ideas.

Faraday had guessed that under certain circumstances, the electric and magnetic field lines could be disturbed by waves travelling through the air.

He could have been a big alum.

Almost like ripples in the surface of water.

Maxwell used his equations to show that the fields could fluctuate in time with each other.

Because what Maxwell called an electromagnetic wave, he could even measure the speed of the wave.

This says the electromagnetic wave travelled through space and buried in here, he was able to extract the speed that the wave travels.

And when he put the numbers in from things that Faraday and other people already measured, he worked out the speed and it came out as a phenomenal 300,000 kilometers every second roughly.

And that, I think, is the moment of discovery because he knew that people had measured the speed of light, which was 300,000 kilometers every second.

Now, this moment you think, is this a coincidence?

Or are these equations telling me something?

And of course they're telling you something and what the message is, light is an electromagnetic wave.

This was a stunning conclusion.

Maxwell had explained what light itself was.

At the same time, he'd introduce something new to science.

Electromagnetic waves.

And they were destined to change our planet.

Problem was, he hadn't physically demonstrated the existence of these waves.

It was all in the maths.

Physical proof would have to come later.

His equations were an astonishing piece of work packed with radical ideas.

Maxwell gave us a unified theory of electricity and magnetism.

He solved the mystery of what light was.

And he predicted the existence of these invisible fields that would directly affect our life.

You know, that's difficult enough to grasp for our 24th century scientists, but what on earth did the Victorians think?

The fact that Maxwell was asking a lot from his peers.

Invisible fields, undetected waves, then smarts.

It's all about much for 19th century scientists.

Ironically, Maxwell found himself in a similar position to Faraday, surrounded by skeptical colleagues, and lacking the proof to vindicate his theory.

But a jubilant Maxwell was undeterred.

He wrote an excited letter to his cousin.

I also have a paper of float with an electromagnetic theory of light, which until I'm convinced of the contrary, I hold to be great guns.

The guns may have fired, but it would be a while before they'd be heard.

It took more than 20 years before a German scientist called Heinrich Hertz found physical proof for electromagnetic waves.

When he was asked what practical use the wave had he replied, it's of no use whatsoever.

This is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right.

How wrong he was, because Hertz had discovered radio waves.

Marconi invented the radio, and since then we've been using them to spread radio and television all over the planet.

But this was just the first in a long list of discoveries.

Using higher frequency radio waves, we developed Rida, which now gets used in everything from aviation to geology.

Microwaves were discovered, which we use in cooking and when we use a mobile phone.

Infrared is used in thermal imaging, and in most TV remote controls.

Ultraviolet is used in fluorescent lamps, security marking and medical research.

X-rays are provided as with a valuable medical tool, but more recently in security.

And gamma rays have been used to detect and treat cancer, and even to sterilize the food we eat.

All these things are connected.

Max Weller shown that light and the colors we see are electromagnetic waves.

But it predicted there would be more.

Today we know that visible light is just a tiny sliver of a broad spectrum of electromagnetic waves.

And by understanding and exploiting them, we've revolutionized our world.

All thanks to equations, Max Weller published 150 years ago.

That was all part of our future that Max Weller wouldn't see.

When he first published, people didn't understand them.

Back in 1865, there was no say, no evidence of these mysterious electromagnetic waves.

Max Weller was asking people to believe that these waves could pass through empty space and affect things at a distance.

There was too much to ask.

His equations were initially met with a bewildered silence.

19th century scientists were used to thinking of the world in mechanical terms.

Physically tangible objects that could be touched, measured and felt.

Flying in the face of that was Max Weller's theory, based on dense mathematics and visible fields and undetected waves.

Many thought Max Weller's theory was a kind of abstract mathematical speculation.

That he had strayed too far from physical reality.

That he was, in essence, aware of the theories.

Max Weller became convinced that he had to develop his theory of magnetism and electricity.

Not long after that publication, he decided to pursue his own interests and resigned his post at King's.

He was going home.

After the lukewarm reaction to his 1865 publication, the comfort of Glenn Lehrer was welcome.

Ever industrious, Max Weller produced papers on thermodynamics and even topology.

But always he returned to his electromagnetic theory, slowly refining it.

After six years in the wilderness, Cambridge University approached him.

They wanted someone to plan and run, lab and experimental physics.

Despite all his achievements, Max Weller was thogged in line after two other candidates had rejected the offer.

In 1871, he left Glenn Lehrer for Cambridge, where he designed and built the Cavendish laboratory,

which would be responsible for discoveries that shaped physics in the 20th century.

And as its first director, his open-minded approach set the tone for subsequent generations.

I never tried to dissuade a man from trying an experiment.

If he does not find out what he wants, he may find out something else.

The Cavendish lab would become a phenomenal success.

It's within these walls that we discovered the electron, and later on the neutron.

What's in and quick we're working here when, in 1953, x-rays were used to show the structure of DNA.

The Cavendish is now widely regarded as a centre of excellence, and it's produced 29 Nobel Prize winners to date.

But every summer, Max Weller returned to Glenn Lehrer, patiently working out the full implications of his electromagnetic theory.

In 1873, Max Weller released a dynamical theory of electricity and magnetism.

The intervening years had allowed his colleagues time to digest his theory, and it was starting to gain traction.

But he wouldn't live to see it vindicated.

In guests were visiting Glenn Lehrer in 1879, Max Weller found that he could barely walk down to the river.

Such was the pain. The pain was in his stomach.

In October of that year, he was diagnosed with abdominal cancer, given a month of love.

Max Weller was just 48 when he received the news.

He knew his mother had died at the same age, from the same disease.

Nevertheless, he accepted his fate with a calm stoicism that had defined his life.

Catherine Nostem has best she could.

It's said that on his deathbed, Max Weller breathed deeply with a long look at his wife, passed away.

James Clark, Max Weller died in November 1879.

He was buried in Parton Cook, his childhood church, just a few miles from his beloved Glenn Lehrer.

He lies in a modest grave next to his parents. In seven years later, Catherine would be buried next to him.

Apart from a plaque outside the cemetery, there's nothing to mark.

This grave is different from any of the others. There's no list of grand achievements.

It's just simple and modest. Like the man himself.

A visitor could be forgiven for passing the grave without a second glance.

But for some, this is a special place.

There's a story that's told around Parton Cook. Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, two buses arrived, and people filed into the grave yard.

A curious local asked who they were. They were, they said, Russian scientists, who had travelled to visit the grave of Scotland's Einstein.

You know, Max Weller died at a relatively young age, 48.

Which even by the standards of his day was an untimely death.

He was just wondering, you know, given the achievements that he had in his lifetime, what he would have conjured up if he'd lived in the 50s, 60s, 70s.

Max Weller may not have been fully appreciated in this time, but in the decades following his death, scientists started to recognise his genius.

The

Eight years after Max Weller's death, Heinrich Hertz discovered radio waves, proving beyond the existence of electromagnetic waves.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Over a century later, these waves have changed our planet and are part of our everyday lives.

We are part of our planet.

But focusing on the technological results of his work diminishes its importance, because he changed the way we understand reality itself.

Before the work of Max Weller the Faraday, just before on the experiments, we understood the world in terms of springs and cogs of machine-like world.

And that machine-like world was pretty primitive.

What Max Weller's work showed is the way that we understand the interaction between material bodies is via this idea of a field.

Not the sort of field we're standing in, which is not a green field, but it's something that penetrates space and which really governs the way the world behaves.

Max Weller helped overthrow the mechanical model of the universe that physicists had held since Newton, and issued in a new era.

We now think of all the forces in the universe interacting through fields, rather than direct physical contact.

This was a crucial shift in our understanding. Procting Einstein to see one scientific epoch ended and another began with James Clark Maxwell.

Which is perhaps why still revered by scientists today?

This meeting we're having here in Edinburgh today is very special. We're celebrating the 150th anniversary of Maxwell's publication of his equations of electromagnetism.

Some of Britain's finest science has gathered at an event to remember the life and work of James Clark Maxwell.

Maxwell is all around us. Every single piece of technology that's around us today, computing, fiber optics, cameras, mobile phones, everything depends on extensions of those Maxwell's equations.

Without those, we wouldn't be where we are today. Even the internet doesn't exist without them.

Maxwell changed the way we think forever.

He can't overestimate his contribution, his influence on everything, but it's practical and theoretical.

He is the most remarkable Scott. He's actually the ever-arisen. No question about it.

In terms of the sequence of a great amount of physics starting with Galileo and Newton, then comes Maxwell.

And then Einstein, who said that Maxwell was the greatest physicist after Newton.

It's wonderful to be sitting in the audience of a meeting surrounded by Nobel Prize winners, The Great and the Good.

There's a sense of shared excitement. It's unapologetic geekiness that however, the people like Peter Higgs and Nobel Prize winners, we are still in awe of this giant of physics.

And having got to know the man, I can understand why.

I can't blame people for not knowing about James Clark Maxwell. This is difficult stuff.

I just think that given the breadth of his discoveries and the sheer impact of that, it's a travesty.

Maxwell's name is not up there with Newton and Einstein as one of the greatest.

Maxwell is Scotland's Einstein. We should remember him as such.

What would it be like to take a journey into the mind of the world's most famous physicist?

Go to BBC iPlayer to watch the animation short inside the mind of Professor Stephen Hawking.

Here on BBC4, though, dredging up the secrets of the Spanish Armada and the Mary Rose, in part one of Shiprex, Britain's sunken history, next.