List of things named after James Clerk Maxwell

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This is a list of things named for James Clerk Maxwell.

Science

Electromagnetism

Thermodynamics and kinetic theory

Solid mechanics

Astronomy

Optics

  • Maxwellian view, a method of illuminating the eye by focusing an image at the plane of the pupil.[4]

Neuroscience

  • Maxwell's Spot, a reddish spot seen in the centre of a visual field when a white surface is viewed through a dichroic filter transmitting red and blue lights. In 1856, Maxwell observed a dark spot in the blue region of a prismatic spectrum.[5] The spot moved with his eye but disappeared upon looking elsewhere in the spectrum. He concluded that the spot is a phenomenon produced in the eye (an entoptic phenomenon) by a localized absorption of blue light by the yellow pigment of the central region of the retina (the macula leutea). Maxwell also proposed that the spot appeared as the cross of fuzzy bow-tie shapes (Haidinger's brushes), one blue, the other yellow, when the light is polarized, discovered by Austrian physicist Wilhelm Karl von Haidinger in 1844.

Prizes

Others

The James Clerk Maxwell Monument in Edinburgh, by Alexander Stoddart. Commissioned by The Royal Society of Edinburgh; unveiled in 2008.

See also

Footnotes

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