MAXWELL CONCEIVES THE MODERN WORLD.

MAXWELL, JAMES CLERK. 1831-1879.

Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1873.

MAXWELL, JAMES CLERK. 1831-1879. Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1873.
2 volumes. 8vo. Half-titles, 21 lithographed plates, errata slip in volume 1, without publisher's advertisements sometimes found in volume 2. Publisher's pebbled cloth, spines ruled and lettered in gilt, expertly rebacked, retaining original spines; custom cloth folding box.
Provenance: Silas W. Holman (inscription: "S.W. Holman / Boston / 1878").

"From a long view of the history of mankind ... there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electrodynamics."
- Richard Feynman, Feynman Lectures on Physics.

FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE, of Maxwell's first complete presentation of the theory of electromagnetism, from the library of Silas Holman, founder of the original Heat Measurements Lab at M.I.T.

Maxwell's treatise recognizing "that light and electricity are the same in their ultimate nature" (Grolier/Horblit) created the framework for modern physics and Einstein's theory of relativity. Einstein himself summed up Maxwell's groundbreaking advance: "Before Maxwell people thought of physical reality—in so far as it represented events in nature—as material points, whose changes consist only in motions which are subject to total differential equations. After Maxwell they thought of physical reality as represented by continuous fields, not mechanically explicable, which are subject to partial differential equations. This change in the conception of reality is the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since Newton...." (Einstein, "Maxwell's Influence on the Development of the Conception of Physical Reality," 1931).

In 1861, working with a mechanical model for electromagnetic phenomena originally proposed by William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), Maxwell realized that if he made his mechanical model more elastic he could then explain such current flow by introducing a "displacement current" term modifying Ampere's Law. His new model would successfully describe not only Ampere's law, but also Gauss's and Faraday's, and also showed the electromagnetic medium was capable of supporting oscillating waves. Astonishingly, when Maxwell calculated the velocity of the waves, he found that they closely match that of light—"The velocity of transverse undulations in our hypothetical medium ... agrees so exactly with the velocity of light ... that we can scarcely avoid the inference that light consists in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena."

Maxwell's insight changed physics from the Newtonian world of mechanic representation and introduced a universe constructed of fields. Maxwell's theory was so groundbreaking, the full consequences could not be fathomed in its time. According to Freeman Dyson, "Maxwell's theory had to wait for the next generation of physicists, Hertz and Lorentz and Einstein, to reveal its power and clarify its concepts. The next generation grew up with Maxwell's equations and was at home in a universe built out of fields. The primacy of fields was as natural to Einstein as the primacy of mechanical structures had been to Maxwell" (Longair). In 1922, when Einstein was asked if he had accomplished his great work by standing on the shoulders of Newton, he replied, "No, on the shoulders of Maxwell."

Maxwell's Treatise "[demonstrates] the special importance of electricity to physics as a whole. He began the investigation of moving frames of reference, which in Einstein's hands were to revolutionize physics; gave proofs of the existence of electromagnetic waves that paved the way for Hertz's discovery of radio waves; worked out connections between the electrical and optical qualities of bodies that would lead to modern solid-state physics; and applied Tait's quaternion formulae to the field equations, out of which Heaviside and Gibbs would develop vector analysis" (Norman 1466).

Silas W. Holman (1856-1900, MIT, class of 1876) became a noted MIT professor in physics, and established the original Heat Measurements Lab there in 1889. The first edition of Maxwell's Treatise, the most important work in physics of the 19th-century, is rare, particularly in this condition with interesting provenance. Grolier/Horblit 72; Norman 1466; PMM 355.