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Maxwell's Equations

In 1860, while Americans were waging a bloody civil war, a ``thorough old Scotch laird'' (then only 29) named James Clerk Maxwell was assembling the known laws of electromagnetism into a compact and elegant form that was to lead, a year later, to the discovery that light is in fact a propagating disturbance in the electromagnetic fields. That discovery was later to overturn all the conceptual foundations of classical Physics and leave ``common sense'' in much the same condition as the United States after the Civil War. It was hard times all around, but exciting . . . .