The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [190]
There is, of course, more: the fields produced by lightning miles away, the fields of the charged cosmic ray particles as they zip through the room, and more, and more. What a complicated thing is the electric field in the space around you!
If Queen Victoria had ever called an urgent meeting of her counsellors, and ordered them to invent the equivalent of radio and television, it is unlikely that any of them would have imagined the path to lead through the experiments of Ampere, Biot, Oersted and Faraday, four equations of vector calculus, and the judgement to preserve the displacement current in a vacuum. They would, I think, have gotten nowhere. Meanwhile, on his own, driven only by curiosity, costing the government almost nothing, himself unaware that he was laying the ground for the Westminster Project, ‘Dafty’ was scribbling away. It’s doubtful whether the self-effacing, unsociable Mr Maxwell would even have been thought of to perform such a study. If he had, probably the government would have been telling him what to think about and what not, impeding rather than inducing his great discovery.
Late in life, Maxwell did have one interview with Queen Victoria. He worried about it beforehand - essentially about his ability to communicate science to a non-expert - but the Queen was distracted and the interview was short. Like the four other greatest British scientists of recent history, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, P.A.M. Dirac and Francis Crick, Maxwell was never knighted (although Lyell, Kelvin, J.J. Thomson, Rutherford, Eddington and Hoyle in the next tier were). In Maxwell’s case, there was not even the excuse that he might hold opinions at variance with the Church of England: he was an absolutely conventional Christian for his time, more devout than most. Maybe it was his nerdishness.
The communications media - the instruments of education and entertainment that James Clerk Maxwell made possible - have never, so far as I know, offered even a mini-series on the life and thought of their benefactor and founder. By contrast, think of how difficult it is to grow up in America without television teaching you about, say, the life and times of Davy Crockett or Billy the Kid or Al Capone.
Maxwell married young, but the bond seems to have been passionless as well as childless. His excitement was reserved for science. This founder of the modern age died in 1879 at the age of 47. While he is almost forgotten in popular culture, radar astronomers who map other worlds have remembered: the greatest mountain range on Venus, discovered by sending radio waves from Earth, bouncing them off Venus, and detecting the faint echoes, is named after him.
Less than a century after Maxwell’s prediction of radio waves, the first quest was initiated for signals from possible civilizations on planets of other stars. Since then there have been a number of searches, some of which I referred to earlier, for the time-varying electric and magnetic fields crossing the vast interstellar distances from possible other intelligences - biologically very different from us - who had also benefited sometime in their histories from the insights of local counterparts of James Clerk Maxwell.
In October 1992, in the Mojave Desert, and in a Puerto Rican karst valley, we initiated by far the most promising, powerful and comprehensive search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). For the first time NASA would organize and operate the programme. The entire sky would be examined over a ten-year period with unprecedented sensitivity and frequency range. If, on a planet of any of the 400 billion other stars that make up the Milky Way galaxy, anyone had been sending us a radio message, we might have had a pretty fair chance of hearing them.
Just one year later, Congress pulled the plug. SETI was not of pressing importance;