Glenlair, James Clerk Maxwell’s home in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. The house and grounds were Maxwell’s childhood playground, providing many stimuli to the budding young scientist. (back to text)
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Glenlair, James Clerk Maxwell’s home in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. The house and grounds were Maxwell’s childhood playground, providing many stimuli to the budding young scientist. (back to text)
A field, the key mathematical concept introduced in Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism. The arrows show the direction and strength of the field, and the grid of grey lines the coordinates, for each point in space. (back to text)
Maxwell’s diagrams showing the machinery for magnetic fields and electric currents. On the left, the hexagonal cells are “vortices,” representing a magnetic field. The particles between them carry an electric current. On the right is the magnetic field of a current in a wire. (back to text)
The School of Athens by Raphael. Plato (left) and Aristotle (right) stand in the central arch. Seated at front centre, thinking and writing, is Heraclitus. To the left of him are Parmenides, Hypatia, Pythagoras, and Anaximander. At front right, using a compass, is Euclid. (back to text)
The 1927 Fifth International Solvay Conference, held at the height of the quantum revolution which overturned the classical world-view. (back to text)
The double-slit experiment. A laser (top) shines light of a single wavelength on two slits in a partition (middle). The light waves from each slit spread out and interfere, producing a pattern of stripes on the screen (bottom). (back to text).
Emergence of a region of the universe from the big bang. (back to text)
The temperature of the cosmic microwave background radiation, measured across the sky by the Differential Microwave Radiometer on nasa’s cobe satellite. Hotter is red, colder is blue. At top left is the original picture, showing the asymmetry due to Earth’s motion. Removing the effect of the motion produces the picture at lower left, showing the Milky Way as a band across the middle. Removing the galaxy’s emission produces the picture at right, showing the primordial density variations in the universe. (back to text)
The cluster of galaxies known as Abell 2218, two billion light years away from us. The stretched-out “arcs” of light are the images of galaxies behind the cluster, lensed and distorted by the cluster’s gravitational field. The distortion can be used to measure the distribution of mass within the cluster, revealing the existence of a substantial quantity of “dark matter” in addition to the visible galaxies, stars, and hot gas. (back to text)
The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cape Town, South Africa. (back to text)
A group of aims students at the 2008 launch of the Next Einstein Initiative, a plan to create fifteen aims centres across Africa within a decade. The two men in suits are Michael Griffin (left), head of nasa, and Mosibudi Mangena (right), the South African Minister for Science and Technology at the time. The woman in the head scarf at the picture’s centre is Esra, from Sudan. The man at front right is Yves, from Cameroon. (back to text)
The formula that summarizes all the known laws of physics. (back to text)
The atlas detector at the Large Hadron Collider at cern in Geneva, Switzerland. This giant apparatus (notice the person standing on the platform) is used to detect and analyze the spray of particles produced by the collision of two particle beams at its centre. (back to text)
Artist’s impression of a typical collision at the Large Hadron Collider, revealing the existence of the Higgs boson. The discovery confirmed theorists’ predictions, made a half-century ago, that the vacuum is permeated with a Higgs field. (back to text)
