By Matin Durrani
In case you’ve forgotten – and shame on you if you have – 2015 has been designated the International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies (IYL 2015). There’s been loads going on all over the globe, which you can follow on the excellent IYL 2015 blog, and we at Physics World have been in on the act too don’t forget. Our March 2015 issue was devoted to light and we also produced a digital-only collection of our 10 best features on light, which you can read free here.
Over at the University of Bristol in the UK, the physics department has been busy too and on Friday played host to a wonderful little meeting entitled “Focus on Light”. The conference was supported by three specialist groups of the Institute of Physics (which publishes Physics World) – those devoted to the history of physics, quantum electronics and photonics, and quantum optics, quantum information and quantum control – as well as the Institute’s south-west branch.
I was able to stay only for the morning session, which saw some great talks on how some animals create light through iridescence (Pete Vukusic), on the history of lighting technology (Neil Dennis-Purves), and the battle over the wave and particle views of light (Peter Rowlands). But for me the astrophysicist Malcolm Longair from the University of Cambridge stole the show, with a wonderful lecture on the power and beauty of Maxwell’s great paper of 1865, which is one of the reasons we are celebrating light this year.
That paper, of course, saw Maxwell unify our thinking about electricity and magnetism and led him to realize, to his amazement, that electrical and magnetic disturbances travel at the speed of light, which had recently been measured to great accuracy by Léon Focault and others.
Longair has recently published a paper in which he recasts Maxwell’s 1865 paper using SI units and modern notation. In doing so, Longair found himself getting right inside the mind of Maxwell and becoming more enraptured than ever before of someone he puts on a par with Newton and Einstein.
“I love intellectual beauty in physics and Maxwell’s paper of 1865 was intellectual beauty of the highest standards,” Longair told delegates on Friday.
You can hear more about why Longair is so enamoured by Maxwell’s equations in the audio clip above. Meanwhile, don’t forget to check out our collection of top features on light if you want more about the power and beauty of light as we reach the mid-way point of IYL 2015.
