Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
and television, it is unlikely that any of them would have
imagined the path to lead through the experiments of Ampere,
Biot, Oersted and Faraday, four equations of vector calculus,
and the judgement to preserve the displacement current in a
vacuum. They would, I think, have gotten nowhere. Meanwhile,
on his own, driven only by curiosity, costing the government
almost nothing, himself unaware that he was laying the
ground for the Westminster Project, 'Dafty' was scribbling
away. It's doubtful whether the self-effacing, unsociable Mr
Maxwell would even have been thought of to perform such a
study. If he had, probably the government would have been
telling him what to think about and what not, impeding rather
than inducing his great discovery.
Late in life, Maxwell did have one interview with Queen
Victoria. He worried about it beforehand - essentially about his
ability to communicate science to a non-expert - but the Queen
was distracted and the interview was short. Like the four other
greatest British scientists of recent history, Michael Faraday,
Charles Darwin, P.A.M. Dirac and Francis Crick, Maxwell was
never knighted (although Lyell, Kelvin, J.J. Thomson, Rutherford,
Eddington and Hoyle in the next tier were). In Maxwell's
case, there was not even the excuse that he might hold opinions at
variance with the Church of England: he was an absolutely
conventional Christian for his time, more devout than most.
Maybe it was his nerdishness.
The communications media - the instruments of education and
entertainment that James Clerk Maxwell made possible - have
never, so far as I know, offered even a mini-series on the life and
thought of their benefactor and founder. By contrast, think of
how difficult it is to grow up in America without television
teaching you about, say, the life and times of Davy Crockett or
Billy the Kid or Al Capone.
Maxwell married young, but the bond seems to have been
passionless as well as childless. His excitement was reserved for
science. This founder of the modern age died in 1879 at the age of
47. While he is almost forgotten in popular culture, radar astronomers
who map other worlds have remembered: the greatest
mountain range on Venus, discovered by sending radio waves
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