James Clerk Maxwell

Despite spending significant undergraduate time in the JCM building at Edinburgh University all those years ago I had failed to register the man’s outstanding contribution to theoretical physics in the nineteenth century, so I found tonight’s BBC4 documentary on “Scotland’s Einstein” most revealing, setting out his work on discovering and mathematically modelling electromagnetic fields/waves that form the foundation of modern technology; and even the use of red, blue and green LEDs on such technology’s colour display screens utilises his earlier research into light that showed it is these primary colours of light (interestingly different from those for paint – green instead of yellow) that the eye responds to and combines to discern other shades.