2. Course Outline
Chapter 1 – 5
Course plan
Marks Distribution – 100 marks
Assignments & Class Participation – 10 marks
Quizzes – 40 marks
Continuous Assessment 1 – 20 marks
Continuous Assessment 2 – 20 marks
Final Assessment – 50 marks
10. James Clerk Maxwell
• James Clerk Maxwell, one of the world's greatest physicists, was Professor of Natural
Philosophy at King's from 1860 to 1865, perhaps the most fertile years of his career. It
was during this period that he demonstrated that magnetism, electricity and light
were different manifestations of the same fundamental laws, and described all these,
as well as radio waves, radar, and radiant heat, through his unique and elegant
system of equations. These calculations were crucial to Albert Einstein in his
production of the theory of relativity 40 years later, and led Einstein to comment that
'One scientific epoch ended and another began with James Clerk Maxwell'.
• Maxwell also made a major contribution to the understanding of colour vision and
the first demonstration of colour photography. He produced notable work on the
theory of rolling curves, on the composition of Saturn's rings, on the nature of gases
and on electrical measurements.
• At King's the James Clerk Maxwell Building at the Waterloo Campus commemorates
him, as does a chair in Physics named after him and a society for undergraduate
physicists.
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20. Electromagnetic Fields
• Electromagnetics is the study of the effect of charges at rest and
charges in motion.
• Some special cases of electromagnetics:
• Electrostatics: charges at rest
• Magnetostatics: charges in steady motion (DC)
• Electromagnetic waves: waves excited by charges in time-varying motion
