James Clerk Maxwell

I've been rereading Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed for what may be the 15th or so time. The main character is an alien physicist in a relatively far future who is on the verge of developing the theoretical framework needed for transilience, the technology of communicating across space instantaneously.  

It felt like an odd juxtaposition when I saw a post this morning about James Clerk Maxwell, a 19th century Scottish physicist who I don't remember ever hearing of, given my deficient science education.

From his Wikipedia page, I learned that in his short 48 years of life right in the middle of the century, Maxwell was the first to describe how light, electricity, and magnetism are all different aspects of the same thing. He created equations for electromagnetism that are considered the second great unification of physics (Newton is credited with the first great unification). 

Based on that work, Maxwell predicted that radio waves exist. He figured out that color (in light) can be reproduced with just red, green, and blue, and "presented the first durable colour photograph in 1861..." 

He did work in several areas not related to his main fields, like structural engineering, and "was the first to recognize chaos, and the first to emphasize the butterfly effect." He worked in a number of scientific areas I can't even explain. 

He's considered to be the founder of electrical engineering. He introduced the terms relativity and quantum mechanics to the field of physics. 

All of that is from the introduction to his Wikipedia page. I almost didn't read the full version because the introduction seemed pretty thorough. But here's one notable fact from the longer text: Maxwell almost died from smallpox in 1860, before he had published any of what became his best-known work.

The post I saw this morning, which started me on this topic, was about a fundraising effort in the UK to buy the church where Maxwell is buried in Parton, Scotland.  

The community needs 70,000 pounds to buy Parton Kirk from the Church of Scotland and do some immediate repairs. As I understand it, if they do not acquire it, the land (or the building? I'm not sure) will be sold to a storage business. Why the Church of Scotland can't donate the building for such a measly amount of money, I don't know. 

They have until November 1, 2026, to raise the money, and as of this writing the campaign is at just under 45,000 pounds.