11/24/2015

Maxwell's equations: 150 years of light | Science | The Guardian

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 Faradays experiments and insights, the
equations unified electricity, magnetism and optics. Their far-reaching consequences for our
civilisation, and our universe, are still being explored
Jon Butterworth
Sunday 22 November 2015 08.38GMT

he 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 Maxwells equations, published by the Royal
Society in 1865, 150 years ago.
Verbally, the equations can be summarised as something like:
Electric and magnetic fields make electric charges move. Electric charges cause electric
fields, but there are no magnetic charges. Changes in magnetic fields cause electric fields,
and vice versa.
The equations specify precisely how it all happens, but that is the gist of it.
Last week I was at a meeting celebrating the anniversary at the Royal Society in London,
and was privileged to see the original manuscript, which is not generally on public view.
It was submitted in 1864 but, in a situation familiar to scientists everywhere, was held
up in peer review. Theres a letter, dated March 1865, from William Thomson (later Lord
Kelvin) saying he was sorry for being slow, that hed read most of it and it seemed pretty
good (decidely suitable for publication).
The equations seem to have been very much a bottom-up affair, in that Maxwell
collected together a number of known laws which were used to describe various
experimental results, and (with a little extra ingredient of his own) fitted them into a
unified framework. What is amazing is how much that framework then reveals, both in
terms of deep physical principles, and rich physical phenomena.

Fields and Waves

The equations show that electric and magnetic fields can exist even in the absence of
electric charges. A changing electric field causes a changing magnetic field, which will
cause more changes in the electric field, and so on. Mathematically this is expressed in
the fact that the equations can be rearranged and combined to get a new kind of
equation, that describes a travelling wave. So not only do the fields become real physical
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Maxwell's equations: 150 years of light | Science | The Guardian

objects - something that Faraday was the first to propose - but they can carry travelling
waves. Those waves are electromagnetic radiation. That is, visible light, radio, wifi, Xrays and the rest, depending on the wavelength.

Relativity
The equations work in three dimensions, and relate fields pointing in different directions
to each other. So the electric field in north-south direction depends upon what the
magnetic field in the east-west direction is doing, for example. Maxwell wrote it all out
component-by-component, direction-by-direction, in twenty seperate equations. These
days we use vectors (objects with a length and an orientation, like an arrow) to condense
the equations down to four. This makes a symmetry of the equations apparent. Like a
sphere, they are the same from any angle. If I rotate the directions so that north becomes
east, or southwest, or whatever, so long as I rotate all the axes together, nothing changes
and the same equations still work.
Even more than this rotational symmetry, the equations stay the same if I boost my
speed. And in particular, the speed of those waves described above stays the same. That
is, the speed of light is the same for me, you and everyone, even if we are moving at
different speeds relative to each other. This violates Newtonian mechanics, and it
required Einstein and his relativity (for which the universality of the speed of light in a
vacuum is a founding principle) to sort it out.

Conservation of charge
One of the things that is built into Maxwells equations is the conservation of electric
charge. The equations can be rearranged to show that the only way to change the
amount of electric charge in a given volume is to have an electric current take it away.
You cant just vanish the charge. Or create it. Thats what a conservation law means.
Now there is a theorem due to the mathematician Emmy Noether which is well-known
to physicists, and which states a deep relationship between conservation laws and
symmetries. The conservation of charge should be associated with a symmetry, but what
symmetry is it?
The symmetry is a little obscured in the usual form of Maxwells equations, which uses
electric and magnetic fields. But if, instead of the electric field, we use the voltage, and if
we do a similar thing with the magnetic field, we get a new, equivalent set of equations
which now do have a more obvious symmetry, in that only voltage differences matter.
The absolute voltage has no meaning. This is why birds can sit on high-voltage electric
cables without turning into tasty fried snacks. The wires are at a high voltage, but as long
as the birds are at the same voltage, no electric current flows and no harm is done.
Changing the voltages everywhere in the world at once makes no difference to anything.
In fact for all you know, I just did it then, while you were reading that sentence.
Invariance under changes of voltage is a symmetry of the equations, which has
important consequences, especially once quantum mechanics comes along.

The Standard Model

Now, one thing Maxwells equations dont contain is quantum mechanics. They are
classical equations. But if you take the quantum mechnical description of an electron,
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Maxwell's equations: 150 years of light | Science | The Guardian

and you enforce the same charge conservation law/voltage symmetry that was contained
in the classical Maxwells equations, something marvellous happens. The symmetry is
denoted U(1), and if you enforce it locally - that it, you say that you have to be allowed
make different U(1) type changes to electrons at different points in space, you actually
generate the quantum mechanical version of Maxwells equations out of nowhere. You
produce the equations that describe the photon, and the whole of quantum
electrodynamics.
For historical reasons, this local U(1) symmetry is called a gauge invariance. Enforcing
similar invariances for other symmetries, known as SU(2) and SU(3), generates the weak
force (the W and Z bosons) and the strong force (the gluon) respectively. Together, and
with the Higgs boson thrown in to cope with the masses, they constitute the Standard
Model, the best theory we have of fundamental particle physics so far.
These days, when building up a new theory, such gauge symmetries would be imposed
as a general principle from the beginning, and wed study their consequences. But
remember, Maxwells theory was built up piece-by-piece from the painstaking
observations of Faraday and others, and the general principles were discovered in his
equations later.
Maxwell didnt know all of the above, he couldnt have. As was pointed out several times
this week, both at the Royal Society meetings and at a Light and Dark Matters event at
the Tate Modern on Friday, the equations of nature often seem to know much more than
the people who discover them.
The physical phenomena arising from Maxwells equations are far too diverse and
numerous to cover in one article. I already mentioned some of them in the opening
paragraph. The art of Liliane Lijn, which she was discussing with Robert Dijkgraaf at the
Tate, constitutes another, as does the Durham light show I wrote about last week. Many
more were covered in the Royal Society meeting, including complicated but beautiful
interactions with many different materials.
I have an animated illustration to finish off. The image at the start of the article shows a
polarised dipole, a tiny structure which might be set spinning by a polarised beam of
light. The dipole is near the surface of a metal. Waves of charge-density ripple outwards.
But crucially, solving Maxwells equations for this system shows that they will head off
in a direction that depends upon the orientation of the dipole. This is important as it
offers a quick and efficient way of directing light around the insides of an optical,
perhaps even quantum, computer or communications system. You can see a rather
beautiful simulation of this happening in the video below.
The work is in this paper, and was presented by Francisco J. Rodrguez-Fortuo at the
Royal Society meeting - thanks to him for providing the video.
Appropriately for this 150th anniversary, 2015 is the International Year of Light, and the
event at the Tate Modern, sponsored by the Institute of Physics, was part of those
celebrations.
It seems likely Maxwells equations contain plenty of treasure still to be found.
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Maxwell's equations: 150 years of light | Science | The Guardian

Jon Butterworths book Smashing Physics is available as Most Wanted Particle in

Canada & the US and was shortlisted for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books.
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