James Clerk Maxwell quotes - page 2
The influence of Quetelet's ideas spread throughout the sciences, even to the physical sciences. The two primary founders of the modern kinetic theory of gases, based on considerations of probability, were James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann. Both acknowledged their debt to Quetelet. ...historians generally consider the influence of the natural sciences on the social sciences, whereas in the case of Maxwell and Boltzmann, there is an influence of the social sciences on the natural sciences, as Theodore Porter has shown.
James Clerk Maxwell
In a famous memoir, Clerk Maxwell showed nearly a hundred years ago that Saturn's rings would be unstable if they were solid, and that they must consist of a swarm of separate bodies. In a system of particles rotating about a centre of gravitational attraction the innermost particles will rotate more rapidly than the outermost, in order to counteract the stronger gravitational pull towards the centre.
In studying the problem of Galactic rotation we are almost entirely dependent on the determination of velocities in the line of sight, which can be measured spectroscopically by the Doppler effect. ...On the theory of Galactic rotation stars which are further from the centre than the sun will tend, in general, to move more slowly, i.e. relative to the sun they will lag behind, whereas stars nearer to the centre will race ahead.
James Clerk Maxwell
Maxwell... mastered electricity and magnetism, light and heat, pretty much mopping up all the major areas of physics beyond those that Newton had... taken care of-gravitation and the laws of motion. ...Maxwell detected an essential shortcoming in Newton's laws of motion, too. They worked... for macroscopic objects, like cannonballs and rocks. But what about the submicroscopic molecules from which such objects were made? ...Newton's laws ...did you no good because you could not possibly trace the motion of an individual molecule ...Maxwell applied the sort of statistical thinking that Quetelet had promoted.
James Clerk Maxwell
Maxwell... during the 1860s... showed that when the velocities reached the bell-shaped distribution, no further net change was likely. (...Ludwig Boltzmann further elaborated... and strengthened Maxwell's results). Any specific molecule would speed up or slow down, but... other molecules would change in speed to compensate. When a gas reached that state... the gas was at equilibrium. ...[T]his notion of equilibrium is precisely analogous to the Nash equilibrium in game theory. ...[J]ust as the Nash equilibrium is typically a mixed set of strategies, a gas seeks an equilibrium state with a mixed distribution of molecular velocities.
James Clerk Maxwell
