‎BOWER Tom‎
‎Maxwell.‎

‎""On the Dynamical Theory of Gases."" Received May 16, - Read May 31, 1866. - [THE ""MAXWELL-DISTRIBUTION""S FINAL FORM - A MAIN PAPER IN 19TH CENTURY PHYSICS.]‎

‎London, Taylor and Francis, 1867. 4to. Extracted and rebound in recent green plain wrappers. Title-page of vol. 157 pasted on to front wrapper. A fine copy. Pp. 49-88.‎

‎First appearance of this seminal paper (in its full version from ""Transactions""), representing the announcement of Maxwell's final ""Theory of Gases"" and introduces the ""Maxwell Distribution"" in its final form, a statistical means of describing aspects of the kinetic theory of gases, a theory, together with his electromagnetic theory, are considered to be SOME OF THE GREATEST ADVANCES IN PHYSICS OF ALL TIMES. Everett considers this paper (1868) to be Maxwell's greatest single paper. Maxwell's discoveries laid the foundations of special relativity and quantum mechanics.One of Maxwell's major investigations was on the kinetic theory of gases. Originating with Daniel Bernoulli, this theory was advanced by the successive labours of John Herapath, John James Waterston, James Joule, and particularly Rudolf Clausius, to such an extent as to put its general accuracy beyond a doubt" but it received enormous development from Maxwell, who in this field appeared as an experimenter (on the laws of gaseous friction) as well as a mathematician.In 1866, he formulated statistically, independently of Ludwig Boltzmann, the Maxwell-Boltzmann kinetic theory of gases. His formula, called the Maxwell distribution, gives the fraction of gas molecules moving at a specified velocity at any given temperature. In the kinetic theory, temperatures and heat involve only molecular movement. This approach generalized the previously established laws of thermodynamics and explained existing observations and experiments in a better way than had been achieved previously. Maxwell's work on thermodynamics led him to devise the Gedankenexperiment (thought experiment) that came to be known as Maxwell's demon.‎

‎On Faraday's Lines of Force. - [MAXWELL'S VERY FIRST PAPER ON ELECTROMAGNETISM]‎

‎London, Taylor and Francis, 1864. 4to. In plain white paper-wrappers with title-page of journal volume pasted on to front wrapper. In ""Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society"", Volume 10. Fine and clean. Pp. (27)-83, (1) + the pasted on title-page.‎

‎First appearance of Maxwell's landmark - and his very first published on electromagnetism - paper in which he anticipates many of the fundamental ideas presented in his famous four-part paper ""On Physical Lines of Force"" (1861-2) in which he derived the equations of electromagnetism. The present paper ushered in a new era of classical electrodynamics and catalyzed further progress in the mathematical field of vector calculus. Because of this, it is considered one of the most historically significant publications in the field of physics and of science in general.Maxwell began his researches on electromagnetism following the completion of his studies at Cambridge in 1854. They were aimed at constructing, at a theoretical level, a unified mathematical theory of electric and magnetic phenomena that would express the methods and ideas of Faraday as an alternative to the theory of Weber."" This programme was announced in his first article, 'On Faraday's lines of force', in 1856, and continued in two other major texts, 'On physical lines of force' in 1861-1862 and 'A dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field' in 1865. According to a famous passage in its preface, the Treatise (1873) represented the outcome of this programme"" (Landmark Writings, p. 569). ""Maxwell's first paper, ""On Faraday's Line of Force"" (1855-1856), was divided into two parts, with supplementary) examples. Its origin may he traced in a long correspondence with Thomson, edited by Larmor in 1936. Part 1 was an exposition of the analogy between lines of force and streamlines in an incompressible fluid. It contained one notable extension to Thomson's treatment of the subject and also an illuminating opening discourse on the philosophical significance of analogies between different branches of physics. This was a theme to which Maxwell returned more than once. His biographers print in full an essay entitled ""Analogies in Nature,"" which he read a few months later (February 1856) to the famous Apostles Club at Cambridge" this puts the subject in a wider setting and deserves careful reading despite its involved and cryptic style. Here, as elsewhere, Maxwell's metaphysical speculation discloses the influence of Sir William Hamilton, specifically of Hamilton's Kantian view that all human knowledge is of relations rather than of things. The use Maxwell saw in the method of analogy was twofold. It crossfertilized technique between different fields, and it served as a golden mean between analytic abstraction and the method of hypothesis. The essence of analogy (in contrast with identity) being partial resemblance, its limits must be recognized as clearly as its existence" yet analogies may help in guarding against too facile commitment to a hypothesis. The analogy of an electric current to two phenomena as different as conduction of heat and the motion of a fluid should, Maxwell later observed, prevent physicists from hastily assuming that ""electricity is either a substance like water, or a state of agitation like heat. ""The analogy is geometrical: ""a similarity between relations, not a similarity between the things related."""" (DSB)The 1856 paper has been eclipsed by Maxwell's later work, but its originality and importance are greater than is usually thought. Besides interpreting Faraday's work and giving the electrotonic function, it contained the germ of a number of ideas which Maxwell was to revive or modify in 1868 and later an integral representation of the field equations (1868),the treatment of electrical action as analogous to the motion of an incompressible fluid (1869, 1873), the classification of vector functions into forces and fluxes (1870), and an interesting formal symmetry in the equations connecting A, B, E, and H, different from the symmetry commonly recognized in the completed field equations. The paper ended with solutions to a series of problems, including an application of the electrotonic function to calculate the action of a magnetic field on a spinning conducting sphere.‎

‎On the Theory of Compound Colours, and the Relations of the Colours of the Spectrum. - [MAXWELL ON THE RELATIONS OF COLOURS]‎

‎(London, Taylor and Francis, 1860). 8vo. In the original printed wrappers. In ""Proceedings of the Royal Society"", Vol. X [10], No. 39. Entire issue offered. Wrappers with a few brown spots, fine and clean. Pp. 404-408. [Entire issue: Pp. 319-494].‎

‎First printing of Maxwell's paper on a method of exhibiting the relations of colours.""Maxwell worked on the generation of white light by mixing different colors and in 1860, published the paper On the Theory of Compound Colours and its Relations to the Colours of the. In this paper, he extended the work of Thomas Young who first postulated only three colors, red, green and violet are necessary to produce any color including white and not all the colors of the spectrum are necessary as first illustrated by Newton. He also incorporated Hermann G?nther Grassman's concept that there are three variables of color vision (spectral color, intensity of illumination and the degree of saturation). Maxwell showed that these color variables can be represented on a color diagram based on three primary colors. While Newton distinguished his principal colors from the painters triad of primary colors (red, yellow and blue), he supposed the identity of mixing rule for lights and pigments. Even though Helmholtz explained that the mixture of color lights is an additive process while the mixture of pigments is a subtractive process as illustrated in Figure 2, Maxwell made experiments and developed a complete theory to explain how this happens by creating a color triangle which was originally suggested by James David Forbes and illustrated that any color can be generated with a mixture of any three primary colors and that a normal eye has three sorts of receptors as illustrated in his 1861 paper On the Theory of Three Primary Colours. He chose the three primary colors as red, green, and blue."" (Sarkar, Pp. 4-5). From 1855 to 1872, Maxwell published at intervals a series of valuable investigations concerning the perception of colour, colour-blindness and colour theory, for the earlier of which the Royal Society awarded him the Rumford Medal. The instruments which he devised for these investigations were simple and convenient to use. For example, Maxwell's discs were used to compare a variable mixture of three primary colours with a sample colour by observing the spinning ""colour top."".‎

‎Maxwell J. (Maxwell K.) The Theory of Heat in the Elementary Processing of Clerk‎

‎Maxwell J. (Maxwell K.) The Theory of Heat in the Elementary Processing of Clerk Maxwell. In Russian (ask us if in doubt)/Maksvell Dzh. (Maksuell K.) Teoriya teploty v elementarnoy obrabotke Klerk Maksuellya. Short description: In Russian (ask us if in doubt).Kyiv: Typography by I.N. Kushnarev 1888. 292 p. We have thousands of titles and often several copies of each title may be available. Please feel free to contact us for a detailed description of the copies available. SKUalbea69099f3be1d0fa‎

‎Untersuchungen über die Druckkräfte des Lichtes. - [FIRST CONFIRMATION OF MAXWELL'S ELECTROMAGNETIC THEORY]‎

‎Leipzig, Barth, 1901. 8vo. Bound in full black cloth with gilt lettering to spine. In ""Annalen der Physik"", Vol. 6, 1901. Entire volume offered. Library labels pasted on to front end papers, stamp to title page, otherwise a fine copy. Pp. 433-58. [Entire volume: VIII, 876 pp. + 3 folded plates].‎

‎First appearance of the account of Lebedev's seminal experiment proving that light exerts a mechanical pressure on material bodies thereby confirming Maxwell's electromagnetic theory for the very first time - a landmark discovery in modern physics. James Clerk Maxwell ""made an important new prediction from his electromagnetic theory-that electromagnetic waves exert a radiation pressure. Bright sunlight, he calculated, presses on the earth's surface with a force of around 4 pounds per square mile [...] This was too tiny a value to be observable in everyday life and its detection posed a challenge to experimenters. Eventually, in 1900, the Russian physicist Pyotr Lebedev succeeded, and confirmed James' prediction. Although small on an earthly scale, radiation pressure is one of the factors that shape the universe. Without it there would be no stars like our sun. [The] discovery also helped to explain a phenomenon that had puzzled astronomers for centuries-why comets' tails point away from the sun"" (Mahan, The Man who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, 183).""As early as 1891 Lebedev became seriously interested in the pressure of light. He turned his attention to the fact that since the force of gravity is proportional to the volume of a body whereas light pressure must be proportional to its surface, it may be asserted that in a particle of cosmic dust the forces of light pressure pushing the particle away from the sun will be equals to the force of gravity attracting it toward the sun. Lebedev used this theory to explain why comets'tails always point away from the sun. His hypothesis was considered correct until the discovery of the solar wind, which creates substantially greater pressure than the sun's light.Around 1898, Lebedev began experimental research on light pressure. Although its presence had been predicted by Maxwell's theory, it had not been detected experimentally before Lebedev. He first undertook research on the pressure of light on solid bodies. Because of the weakness of the effect itself and the considerable number of possible side effects, this experimental problem presented very great difficulties: if a body that is supposed to react to light pressure is placed in a gas, the warming of the body by the light will inevitably cause convection currents and thus set the body in motion. If the body is placed in a vacuum (in practice, in gas at very low pressure), the so called radiometric effect will occur. As a result of the uneven warming of the front and back of the body, the molecules of gas hitting the body from the front will be repulsed more forcefully than those striking the back, thereby exerting greater pressure. By extremely ingenious methods Lebedev succeeded in completely eliminating these side effects and not only detected the pressure of light but also measured it and showed the correctness of Maxwell's quantitative theory. ""Opytnoe issledovanie svetovogo davlenia""(""An Experimental Investigation of the Pressure of Light"") was read by Lebedev at the International Congress of Physicists at Paris in 1899 and was published in 1901."" (DSB)‎