The following is a guest post by Dr. Ram Rao. Ram became excited about physics and mathematics while a student at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India. He came to saving faith in Jesus Christ while studying Electrical Engineering at Caltech. Ram has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and has worked for several decades as a software engineer in the computer industry in the US. He is married to Asha and is the father of four adult children. Ram is now retired and living in Bengaluru, India where he is a member of Anugraha RPC.
The recently deceased prominent physicist Stephen Hawking once said: “Before we understood science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe,” implying that science has proven that God did not create the universe. While Hawking’s views are widely reported in the media they are by no means universal among scientists. James Clerk Maxwell, a 19th century physicist of greater stature than Hawking, would have strongly disagreed. Based on reading his biography and writings, one may surmise his response to Hawking would likely have been: “Because we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe.”
So who is this James Clerk Maxwell, that I bring up? He is a Scottish physicist, that many would consider to be the greatest physicist who ever lived. His most well known contribution is his set of four equations which explain pretty much all of the science of electricity, magnetism and light. This is just one of his many major contributions to science in his short 48 years of life.
What does Stephen Hawking say about Maxwell?
Maxwell is the physicist’s physicist.
How about Albert Einstein? Speaking of his best known work (on relativity), Einstein said,
The special theory of relativity owes its origins to Maxwell’s equations of the electromagnetic field.