The Man Who Changed Everything by Basil Mahon, Wiley, £18.99/$27.95, ISBN 047086088X Reviewed by Marcus Chown
HE was the critical bridge between Newton and Einstein. His laws of electro-magnetism summarised all electrical and magnetic phenomena in four neat equations that revealed light to be an electromagnetic wave. The equations of James Clerk Maxwell forbade the existence of a stationary electromagnetic wave. This means you can never catch up with a light beam – a fact used by Einstein as the cornerstone of his special theory of relativity, which stripped away the straitjacket of Newtonian dynamics.
Seeing Maxwell’s equations for the first…
