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“... James ClerkMaxwell, a Scotsman who lived from 1831 to 1879, was a scientist of outstanding stature. Bearing his name, apart from the famous ‘demon’, is the set of fundamental equations that he discovered, governing the behaviour of electricity, magnetism and light. He also found, among many other things, the basic equation for the distribution of velocities of the molecules in a gas in equilibrium, and made other profound contributions to the statistical study of the molecules in a gas, relating to the Second Law of thermodynamics – which is what Maxwell’s ‘demon’ was all about ...”

“... James ClerkMaxwell was born in 1831. He held chairs at Aberdeen and London and was the first head of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. He died at the early age of 48, leaving behind, as well as much other first-rate work in physics, something quite epoch-making, ‘Maxwell’s equations’, which predicted clearly that electromagnetic waves could exist, and that light was of this nature ...”

“... nature. Invited in 1873 to join a new society for metropolitan physicists, the Cambridge professor James ClerkMaxwell set out in his witty way the practical philosophy of this public science. He thought soirées were like clouds of gas particles: they allowed buttonholing only during the brief if violent collisions of ...”

“... Tripos at Cambridge shaped the physics of men such as William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) and James ClerkMaxwell’. Of course, nobody believes that even Cambridge in the early years of the last century was so inward-looking that the Tripos and Smith’s Prize examinations were the sole influences on the thought ...”

“... present themselves and their work. For instance, Sen describes the classic paddle-wheel experiment James Joule carried out in a brewery. But he doesn’t mention what the historian Otto Sibum found when he attempted to replicate it: Joule had omitted several essential details from his instructions, notably the presence of co-experimenters – the countless ...”

“... Alexander von Humboldt (echoed by Darwin) exulting over the sublimities of tropical landscapes, James ClerkMaxwell affirming the muscular knowledge derived from experiment, dozens of hardy travellers (including Galton) relishing the sights, sounds and smells of exotic locales. The body of the Victorian scientist was ...”

“... which Boltzmann inherited from his great forbears, the German Rudolf Clausius and the Scotsman James ClerkMaxwell, was entropy, a term designed to describe the apparently universal and irreversible tendency of heat to become less capable of doing useful work. Thus entropy measured disorder and the loss of ...”

“... envisaged as permeating all of space. If he was unable to mathematise them, as his great successor James ClerkMaxwell went on to do, the reason may lie not merely in his mathematical shortcomings but in another deep conviction – that mathematics was not, after all, the appropriate language for understanding God’s ...”

“... because he was unfamiliar with university teaching and research – some academic physicists like James ClerkMaxwell disparaged his lack of higher mathematics – but mainly because he wanted access to the London social world, with its salons and clubs. London also provided more opportunities to boost his income: he ...”

“... Alfred Hitchcock) and those whose knowledge ‘changed everything’ (Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, James ClerkMaxwell). Everything-knowers are admired, though with qualifications: the ‘know-it-all’ is an intellectual bully or a bore, and one thing it’s useful to know is when not to tell everyone that you know ...”

“... announcing his subject’s date of birth; unlike most biographers, he gets it wrong. Charles Henry Maxwell Knight was born on 9 July 1900, not 4 September, under the sign of Cancer, not Virgo, however tempting it may be, for reasons which become clear in the course of the story, to assign him to the latter. Information about ...”

“... high-profile exemplar of this style was the magnate, George Walker; once, according to James Morton, an ‘ally’ of Billy Hill and Eddie Chapman, later a frequently puffed adornment of the Thatcherite open market culture.) There is nothing new in the concept, quality tailoring bonded over primal naughtiness. It has been spelled out frequently in ...”

“... at this time, but if so, after news of the pardon. One is addressed to Etienne Garnier, the clerk of the Châtelet prison, who, as Sargent-Bauer says, seems to have advised Villon against an appeal. ‘What d’you think of my appeal, / Garnier?’ Did the clerk really think Villon hadn’t enough ‘philosophy ...”

“... more good young English-speaking scientists than there were in 1935, let alone in the heyday of Clerk Maxwell or of Newton. It is also my impression, though I’ve never counted, that a striking proportion of the more able scientists have been immigrants or foreigners in the lands where they did their best work. Like so much else, it all began in ...”