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  • Milestones
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Classical monument

Maxwell's equations

Nature Materials volume 9, pages S6–S7 (2010)Cite this article

One of the most important contributions made by Maxwell was actually a correction to Ampère's law. He had realized that magnetic fields can be induced by changing electric fields — an insight that was not only necessary for accuracy but also led to a conceptual breakthrough. Maxwell predicted an 'electromagnetic wave', which can self-sustain, even in a vacuum, in the absence of conventional currents. Moreover, he predicted the speed of this wave to be 310,740,000 m s−1 — within a few percent of the exact value of the speed of light.

"The agreement of the results seems to show that light and magnetism are affections of the same substance, and light is an electromagnetic disturbance propagated through the field according to electromagnetic laws", wrote Maxwell in 1865. The concept of light was thus unified with electricity and magnetism for the first time.

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References

ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPERS

  1. Maxwell, J. C. On physical lines of force. Phil. Mag. 11, 161–175; 281–291; 338–348 (1861); ibid. 12, 12–24; 85–95 (1862)

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  2. Maxwell, J. C. A dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. 155, 459–512 (1865)

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  3. Maxwell, J. C. A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (Clarendon Press, 1873)

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  4. Yee, K. S. Numerical solution of initial boundary value problems involving Maxwell's equations in isotropic media. IEEE Trans. Antenn. Propag. 14, 302–307 (1966)

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FURTHER READING

  1. Taflove, A. Computational Electrodynamics: The Finite-Difference Time-Domain Method (Artech House, 1995)

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  1. Associate Editor, Nature Photonics,

    David Pile

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  1. David Pile
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Pile, D. Classical monument. Nature Mater 9 (Suppl 1), S6–S7 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2639

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