Freedom of Science

Maxwell was one of those scholastic physicists who wrote the second intentionally most unreadable treatise in the history of physics and became a legend.¹ But in his brief and readable Matter and Motion² published in 1877 Maxwell pays the price of writing a brief and readable book because we can read and understand it and show that Maxwell is talking nonsense and repeating physics mythology and making physics mythology.

Maxwell writes that “in the experiment of Cavendish the position of the rod of the balance is ascertained by observing a graduated scale as seen by reflection in a vertical mirror fastened to the middle of the rod.” What mirror? Maxwell did not bother to read Cavendish’s original paper.³ Cavendish did not use mirrors.

In another propaganda for Newtonian physics Maxwell claims that “a similar instrument was afterwards independently invented by Coulomb….” In his paper Cavendish himself tells us that Coulomb experimented with torsion pendulum before him. Maxwell is rewriting history to establish British priority.

Maxwell then gives a derivation which has nothing to do with Cavendish’s derivation or the experiment but nevertheless Maxwell uses the authority of the Cavendish experiment to claim that he determined “the constant of gravitation” from “observed quantities.” What Maxwell calls “observerd quantities” turn out to be constants of the pendulum. Maxwell uses the dimensions of the pendulum to define a British unit of force and he asserts it as an experimentally proved constant of nature.⁴ This is fraud. In no other field except in physics such a crime against humanity would have been let unpunished for such a long time.

1. Physicists do not know their own history because history has been Newtonized by Newtonian physicists. [↩]
2. Dover Edition, 1991. Cavendish experiment is on pages 118-119. [↩]
3. Doubly curious since Maxwell edited Cavendish’s papers. [↩]
4. This mythology is still accepted as a scientific truth by physicists today. [↩]

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