Did You Know This Genius Changed Physics Forever?

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/yt to win a meteorite 💥 Pilgrimage mode: kilt on, chapeau secured, and I’m standing outside 14 India Street, Edinburgh — the birthplace of the physicist I’d nominate as the quiet GOAT: James Clerk Maxwell. In this solo vlog, I walk the neighbourhood where Maxwell grew up, try (and fail) to get into the small museum without a reservation, and connect the dots from Maxwell’s equations to the modern world: Wi-Fi, GPS, power grids, and yes… a Tesla charging across the street from his childhood home. CHAPTERS 00:00 Kilted pilgrimage begins 00:32 Maxwell’s Edinburgh origin story (and my museum plea) 01:27 Tesla charging across from Maxwell’s house 02:24 The prodigy years + Cambridge arc 03:00 Maxwell as “natural philosopher” + why he matters now 04:33 “Let there be light” (and what the equations really changed) 06:25 Ether, gears, and the bridge to modern physics Video & Edited by Sheikh Media Website: sheikh.media LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahmadisapro/ This video contains commentary and criticism under Fair Use (17 U. S. C. §107). All third-party clips, articles, and documents are used for educational and critical purposes. Sources & Credits YouTube Clips: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFZpkB3igC8&t=58s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNPwfQDrK5Q&t=42s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sghTX3Zc1sE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh3EfcNzKjI&t=9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWCN_uI5ygY&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6gd3bQLiFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-vS2nVRGc8&t=46s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5Dh35gejuc&t=548s Articles & Documents: https://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2004/PSCF9-04McNatt.pdf https://www.bem.fi/library/1865-001.pdf https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/specrel.pdf Google Images and Wikipedia were used for general reference. AI Tools Used: VEO, Flow, Hygen, Seedance, Nano Bnana, and others for audio and visuals. Stock Footage & Media: All stock footage, audio, and images used from premium licensed accounts: Wondershare Filmora, Shutterstock, Epidemic Sounds, Canva, and Pexels. - Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 Get my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with productivity tips from 9 Nobel Prize winners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life-changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast #universe #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #science #astronomy #cosmology #cosmicmicrowavebackground #intotheimpossible #briankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  Low energy, unfocused, foggy? You might be dehydrated. Whether it's hot yoga, over 100 degree weather, or too much sun. Gator Light, with a specialized blend of five electrolytes, was scientifically designed to help move fluids into the body faster for rapid rehydration. Shop now at retailers nationwide. Gator Light: Hydrates Faster Than Water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.

• 0:59Brian Keating?

  Got on a pilgrimage. Got my Scottish tartan dress. My kilt. My special chapeau. Now where am I? That's what you like to know? Well, who was the most famous physicist who ever lived? Some would say Isaac Newton. I might say Galileo. But I think if you said James Clerk Maxwell, nobody would disagree with you. So that's a hint. A very strong hint. This is where he grew up. This is the park he used to play in. This is where he didn't get into university.

• 1:44Brian Keating?

  And instead, eventually had a petition to go to Cambridge.

• 1:52Speaker 03

  Ah, Edinburgh. The city where I first chased light through the mist. At fourteen, I was already puzzling over the mathematics of curves and colors. Scribbling equations. Didn't pass every exam, mind you. Cambridge nearly said no. But curiosity is a stubborn thing. It carried me from these cobbled streets to the laws that would bind electricity and magnetism forever. Funny, isn't it? A boy who once built spinning color wheels ended up spinning the entire universe. As my friend Professor Brian Keating always says, A, B, C, always be curious.

• 2:27Brian Keating?

  Look at this, they're using electric chargers in the place where James Clerk Maxwell grew up.

• 2:37Brian Keating?

  Pretty cool, right across from his house. There are electric chargers, there is even a Tesla.

• 2:46Brian Keating?

  Tesla charging right by James Clerk Maxwell's house. For the greatest scientist in history, there was the paradigm. Talking about James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell was born 1831 at 14 India Street in Edinburgh, Scotland. And that is where I am today. Paying homage to the physicist some would say was the greatest of all time, the goat.

• 3:21Brian Keating?

  He lived here for many years. He enrolled in advanced education as a youngster, not far from where we are right now.

• 3:34Brian Keating?

  On India Street in Edinburgh. By age 16, he was learning about calculus, teaching himself all about it, and even making original contributions to the subject. He left for Cambridge and he was just 19 years old. June 13th, 1831. Some would say the greatest physicist who ever lived was born. James Clerk Maxwell, right here, 14 India Street. Let's have a look. They called him a natural philosopher.

• 4:04Brian Keating?

  Didn't mean that he was a philosopher, meant he was a theoretical physicist.

• 4:11Brian Keating?

  So we read from Einstein himself, "Many of today's technological advances are due to James Kirk Maxwell, who created the first color photographic image and developed the theory of electromagnetic waves, which made radar and GPS possible." It's commemorated by a statue on George Street, which we'll take a look at. And this is a small museum right at his birthplace. You have to make an appointment to come here, and it is called the International Center of Mathematical Sciences. So with a little luck, we'll be able to go into this great building in not-too-distant future.

• 4:46Speaker 04

  Your eyes are only susceptible to red, green, and blue. You can make any color, like RGB, you can make any color by a combination of reds and greens and blues. You know, and so he took these black and white photographs, and the red light, and the blue light, and miraculously got this color diagram. And so the audience was able to see color for the first time. This is supposed to turn, you know, you have to spin this very fast. And you get a procession. And the clever thing is adding this colored top to it. Because when the axis of procession passes through the yellow, the axis of procession goes around. You can imagine the thing, procession runs a certain axis. And when the axis of procession passes through the yellow, you only see the yellow.

• 5:29Speaker 04

  You don't see this blue, or you don't see red, you don't see green. It's amazing.

• 5:33Brian Keating?

  He never lost track of Edinburgh. This city remained in his heart his whole life. The people, I think it's just spectacular that they preserve the memory of someone who almost nobody knows about. Even the people charging their Teslas across the street here have no idea that the man who came up with the theory of how we could get electromagnetic charge in motion to create electromagnetic fields lived here. And it's quite spectacular to think this is where he came from. His masterpiece, 1865, "Theory of Electrodynamics." A theory of electromagnetism brought light to the world. There are T-shirts you can get that say the four Maxwell equations, the two ancillary

• 6:18Brian Keating?

  equations. And they say, "That's what God said first, and then he said, 'Let there be light.'"

• 6:26Brian Keating?

  It's quite spectacular to be in the place where it all began, almost 200 years ago. 1865, the world was very different. The United States was just coming out of the fiercest war we had ever had, the Civil War. Europe was still led scientifically primarily from the United Kingdom and England.

• 6:49Brian Keating?

  But that title would soon pass to the United States. But Maxwell's contributions were the inspiration behind many of today's inventions, including those Teslas being charged right across the street from where the great Maxwell was born.

• 7:11Brian Keating?

  Maxwell's equations are sort of the foundation for all of modern physics. They provide the basis of, in fact, for the Yang-Mills equations. It's described quantum chromodynamics. The unification of electricity and magnetism led to almost all of modern society.

• 7:32Brian Keating?

  Now, one thing that's not really appreciated very much is how Maxwell was caught between the classical world and the quantum world. And even the mind as great as his could not comprehend how the waves that he predicted of electromagnetism, propagating at an incomprehensible speed, how they could propagate in a vacuum. So his model involved sort of sets of gears and pulleys and all sorts of other things than what we would call the ether. And then, just a mere 40 years later to the year, to the day, almost, Albert Einstein's famous 1905 paper

• 8:16Brian Keating?

  proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that no ether was necessary. But what was necessary was a radical rethinking of time and space. Have time and space could both be relative. Relative to what? To the observer's frame of motion. But what was absolute, the only thing that was absolute, is the ratio between time and space.

• 8:42Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 9:12Brian Keating?

  Namely, speed. And only one speed is absolute. And of course, that's the speed of light, which he knew emerged from his equations. And yet, he still had to have this mechanistic formalism for developing electromagnetic waves. Maxwell died young, only aged 48. He didn't get to live to see what Einstein would later show as the crowning achievement of his life. We already saw how Einstein revered James Clerk Maxwell. But it was forgivable that Maxwell would think that light needed a medium in which to propagate. After all, all waves sing to, at least the waves done at that time. So why would light be any different?

• 9:54Brian Keating?

  This is well before the quantum revolution, that he was trying to discern how light could possibly propagate at such an unimaginable speed. What was needed to make that happen? Air, water, sound, they all needed mediums to be supported them. Light was no different. So he constructed a theory with gears and vortices that would transmit mechanistically, almost bridging the classical and quantum worlds. Of course, we know there's no gears and pulleys within it. And as Michelson and Morley would show, just a mere 30 years after Maxwell's equations

• 10:36Brian Keating?

  were produced, that there is no absolute frame of reference that an ether would produce.

• 10:45Brian Keating?

  Eventually Einstein showed that photons themselves are quantum objects. And this was a revolution and a revelation. Stay tuned for more facts about the great James Clerk Maxwell. I like to think that Maxwell would like this vlog using, as it does, color photography, which he invented. In 1861, even before he came up with his four laws of electromagnetism, he came up with the color photograph. His idea was simple, but radical. All colors can be made by mixing together red, green, and blue. He knew that. What Maxwell did is use photographic plates, but those could only see monochrome, just intensity, not color.

• 11:27Brian Keating?

  So what he did was take a separate filter, a red filter, a green filter, and a blue filter, and then he would expose the image onto the photographic monochrome plate. After doing so, he then projected and combined those three colors together using a light source for each, and then they all were projected onto the same screen. The result was a full color photograph. And this actually links him to Isaac Newton, who knew about the laws of color combination and addition and subtraction, connecting the two great physicists of their respective generations on this lone island. Maxwell showed that color wasn't just art, it was a science, a science that could be

• 12:12Brian Keating?

  understood. And later, just four years later, he would come up with an idea that would link together colors of all wavelengths, including colors that can't be seen by the human eye. Maxwell was a true polymath. He even wrote poetry. He came up with the theory of electromagnetism. He invented color photography. He tried to do his hand at experimental physics. He helped create the standard unit of electric resistance, later called the ohm. He conducted early studies on Saturn's rings, and he surmised that Saturn's rings must be comprised of tiny particles due to their scattering of light and that behavior. He later became an academic trailblazer. Becoming a professor at Cambridge of experimental physics, founding the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, which is legendary.

• 12:55Brian Keating?

  Cavendish became the home of the discovery of DNA, of the neutron, of the electron and the neutron. At 14 years old, he was a prodigy already. Came up with a paper that was published in the Royal Society Transactions on Mathematics. He died of stomach cancer at the young age of only 48 years old. His face is engraved on the Scottish one-pound bag note. Maxwell didn't just speculate about light, he did experiments on it. He was one of the first to understand what polarization was and why it was so important. He showed that polarization of light isn't just an accident, it's a natural consequence of the existence of electromagnetic fields, which Faraday had coined, but Maxwell had proven the existence thereof. And I like to think about explaining to him

• 13:40Brian Keating?

  how the Simons Observatory is seeking out cosmic polarization, trying to understand it. Not in the visible light spectrum, as he explored, but in the microwave part of the spectrum, which he certainly knew about. Now, the most exotic thing we could possibly detect is called cosmic bi-refringence. Bi meaning two, refringence meaning refractions. That would be the case if light propagates at two different velocities, depending on whether it is polarized horizontally or vertically, or if you like, circularly left or circularly right. Now, plans of this detection have been made using Planck satellite data,

• 14:23Brian Keating?

  but we in the Simons Observatory, trying to understand if we can do a more precise and accurate estimation of what the polarization of the CMB looks like and how exotic new physics could manifest itself. This would break so-called Lorentz invariance, which is an underpinning ironically of the special theory of relativity that Einstein used to demolish Maxwell's understanding of the ether. Even though Maxwell had predicted with uncanny accuracy the speed of light and the propagation of radio waves and all electromagnetic radiation at the speed governed by his famous four equations. He died more than a decade before he could see experimental verification of their reality.

• 15:08Brian Keating?

  In the 1880s,

• 15:11Brian Keating?

  A decade after Maxwell died, it was discovered that light and all forms of electromagnetic waves refract, reflect, and propagate at the same speed, no matter what the wavelength fits. Here's a train

• 15:26Brian Keating?

  coming by powered by Maxwell's electricity. Without Maxwell, there'd be no color photography, no Wi-Fi, no electric power,

• 15:39Brian Keating?

  and no light. At least the kind that we enjoy. Stay tuned for more videos about Maxwell and electromagnetism.