Point of Interest James Clerk Maxwell

An interesting problem area that occupied Maxwell s attention from 1855 to 1859 was the nature of the rings of Saturn. He showed that certain ideas of the time, such as that Saturn had solid or rigid rings, were not possible. Instead, the stability of the rings require that they consist of concentric circles of small objects, the orbital speed of each circle being dependent on its distance from the planet. In 1895, the differential rotation of the rings Maxwell predicted almost 40 years earlier was confirmed by observation. 

The study of Saturn s rings led Maxwell to the problem of the motions of large numbers of colliding bodies, such as would be found in the rings. This in turn led him to the study of gas kinetics. Here he introduced the use of statistical methods, not for data analysis but for a description of the physical process. He recognized that there must be a distribution of velocities of gas particles, and by 1860 he had developed a statistical formula for that 

Many things were of interest to Maxwell, and he published papers on a wide range of topics (his first at the age of 14). He studied optics and optical properties of materials, and he developed the fish-eye lens. One of Maxwell s interests and areas of investigation was color vision. He projected the first color photograph, and he explained color blindness as a deficiency in one or two of the three types of color receptors in the eye. He was interested in the stability of the earth s atmosphere and its thermodynamics and in stress in building frameworks. 

Maxwell s success, and the impact of his work on physical chemistry, came from his belief in the power of analogy and also from his interest in studying an assortment of problems. 

1 The rotational constant, B, for carbon monoxide is 3.836 x 10 J. Use Equation 1.3 to find fhe energy of the lowest three rotational state levels (i.e., / = 0,1, and 2) of a carbon monoxide molecule and find the degeneracies of each of these levels. 

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