James Clerk Maxwell Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free James Clerk Maxwell trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
James Clerk Maxwell showed that electricity, magnetism and light are one phenomenon, predicted radio waves, proved Saturn's rings are made of countless particles, took the first colour photograph, founded statistical mechanics, invented a demon that still bothers physicists, and built the Cavendish Laboratory, all before dying at 48. Einstein said he stood on Maxwell's shoulders, not Newton's. This quiz covers the physics and the quiet Scot behind it. Easy questions ask what his equations describe, what he predicted about light and where he was born. Harder ones want the nickname bullies gave him at Edinburgh Academy, the age at which he wrote his first paper, the prize his Saturn essay won, the tartan ribbon photographed in 1861, the speed he calculated for electromagnetic waves, who compressed his twenty equations to four, the poem he sang to a Burns tune and the cancer that killed both him and his mother at 48. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's biography of James Clerk Maxwell, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Made for physics teachers, students and quiz hosts. Related quizzes: Michael Faraday, Famous Physicists and Physics.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope stands near the summit of which Hawaiian mountain?
Mauna Kea
Mauna Kea. Its 15-metre dish is the largest built to work at submillimetre wavelengths, and it is one of the linked telescopes behind the Event Horizon Telescope's pictures of black holes.
Q 02Maxwell's unification of light and electricity led him to predict the existence of what?
Radio waves
Radio waves. He never saw them: he died in 1879, and it was only in the following decade that laboratory experiments with electric sparks produced the invisible waves his equations called for.
Q 03Which 1865 paper showed electric and magnetic fields travel as waves at the speed of light?
A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field
In it he wrote that light "is an electromagnetic disturbance propagated through the field according to electromagnetic laws".
Q 04Richard Feynman predicted that Maxwell's laws of electrodynamics would one day outshine which war of the same decade?
The American Civil War
The American Civil War. Seen from ten thousand years on, Feynman told his students, it would "pale into provincial insignificance" beside the 1860s' real event, Maxwell's equations.
Q 05Who reduced Maxwell's twenty equations to the four now known as Maxwell's equations?
Oliver Heaviside
Oliver Heaviside. A telegraph operator who had left school at 16, he found Maxwell's Treatise so gripping that he gave up his job to master it, then recast the equations in the form used today.
Q 06Which book of 1873 first set out Maxwell's equations in fully developed form?
A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism
A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. He wrote most of it not at a university but at home in rural Scotland, in the years between resigning his London chair and going back to Cambridge.
Q 07What lies at Maxwell's feet on his statue in George Street, Edinburgh?
His dog
His dog. Maxwell kept a succession of terriers called Toby, and one sat between his feet in the Cambridge laboratory, growling, while an electrical machine was worked on its back.
Q 08At which country house in Galloway did Maxwell grow up and later write most of his Treatise?
Glenlair
Glenlair. His parents built it; there the small boy asked of everything "What's the go o' that?", and there he later spent six years writing between professorships.
Q 09What nickname did Maxwell earn on his first day at Edinburgh Academy in homemade shoes?
Daftie
Daftie. He arrived in a tunic and square-toed shoes his father had made, speaking broad Galloway, and went home with the tunic in rags; he took no pains to shake the name off.
Q 10At just 14, Maxwell wrote his first scientific paper on a way of drawing which curves with pins and thread?
Ovals
Ovals. He took up the problem after meeting an artist who wanted a way to draw them, and a professor had to read the paper to the Royal Society of Edinburgh because its author was thought too young.
Q 11What effect was the teenage Maxwell studying when he viewed twisted jelly through polarising prisms?
Photoelasticity
Photoelasticity. David Brewster had found the effect; the student Maxwell cast jelly in a ring, twisted it and watched coloured stress patterns appear between prisms made by William Nicol himself.
Q 12To which Cambridge college did Maxwell transfer from Peterhouse for an easier fellowship?
Trinity
Trinity. He left Peterhouse within a term, reckoning a fellowship would be easier to win at the bigger college, and the bet paid off in 1855, sooner than was usual.
Q 13Alongside his university posts in Cambridge, Aberdeen and London, Maxwell gave regular evening classes to whom?
Working men
Q 21Which near-fatal illness did Maxwell recover from in 1860 before moving to London?
Smallpox
Smallpox. He was thought to have caught it at a horse fair that September; his wife nursed him through it alone, and he said afterwards that her care had saved his life.
Q 22What did Maxwell present at a London lecture in 1861, photographed for him by Thomas Sutton?
The world's first colour photograph
The world's first colour photograph. It was the first that lasted, earlier chemical ones having faded: three black-and-white slides, each taken through a different coloured filter, were projected together through matching filters.
Q 23What object did Thomas Sutton photograph three times for Maxwell's famous lecture demonstration of 1861?
Working men. He began the classes at Cambridge, kept a free weekly one going in Aberdeen, and in London went on teaching the artisans for a winter after he had resigned his chair.
Q 14William Hopkins, who coached Maxwell at Cambridge, was famed for turning out the university's top graduates in which subject?
Mathematics
Mathematics. Hopkins called Maxwell the most extraordinary man he had met, one who seemed unable to think wrongly on any physical subject, yet in analysis he judged him "far more deficient".
Q 15Which three colours of light did Maxwell show would combine to make white, using Forbes's spinning tops?
Red, green and blue
Red, green and blue. On the spinning top the painters' red, yellow and blue never blurred to a neutral grey; with green in place of yellow they did, and every screen has mixed light that way since.
Q 16At which Aberdeen college did Maxwell take the Chair of Natural Philosophy in 1856, aged 25?
Marischal College
Marischal College. He went after a Scottish chair to be near his ailing father, who helped him gather his references and then died weeks before the appointment was announced.
Q 17What did Maxwell conclude Saturn's rings must be made of, in the essay that won him the Adams Prize?
Numerous small particles
Numerous small particles. He proved that a solid ring would be unstable and a fluid one would break up into blobs, which left only a swarm of fragments he called a flight of brick-bats.
Q 18Which spacecraft's flybys of the 1980s confirmed Maxwell's conclusion about the rings of Saturn?
Voyager
Voyager. His prize essay of the 1850s had stood as the last word on the rings for more than a century before the probes' close-up pictures showed that he had been right.
Q 19Whose daughter was Katherine Dewar, whom Maxwell married in Aberdeen in 1858?
His college principal's
His college principal's. The Rev. Daniel Dewar had befriended the young professor, and Katherine went on to work in her husband's laboratory, stoking the fire for his experiments on gases.
Q 20When his Aberdeen college merged with its neighbour in 1860, what happened to Maxwell?
He was made redundant
He was made redundant. The new University of Aberdeen had room for only one professor of natural philosophy and kept the senior man; within months Maxwell held the same chair in London.
A tartan ribbon
A tartan ribbon. Sutton, the inventor of the single-lens reflex camera, shot it on plates so limited that the result was only a partial success, and the method came into its own some forty years later.
Q 24For which famous reference work did Maxwell write the articles 'Atom' and 'Attraction'?
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica. He wrote them for its ninth edition in the 1870s, and his article on capillary action was still being printed, revised by Lord Rayleigh, in the edition of 1911.
Q 25Where in London did Maxwell regularly attend lectures and meet the ageing Michael Faraday?
Royal Institution
The Royal Institution. Seeing him wedged in the crowd leaving its lecture theatre, Faraday teased the expert on jostling molecules that if any man could find his way through a crowd it should be him.
Q 26Maxwell's 1868 paper "On governors" is considered a founding document of which field?
Control theory
Control theory. A governor is the spinning device that holds a steam engine at a steady speed, and Maxwell's study of when one stays stable was the first mathematical treatment of feedback.
Q 27What is the 1867 thought experiment in which an imaginary being sorts particles by energy called?
Maxwell's demon
Maxwell's demon. Maxwell first described only a finite being that could sort fast molecules from slow; it was Lord Kelvin who called it a demon, in print in 1874.
Q 28Which physicist generalised Maxwell's gas-velocity theory, giving the distribution its double-barrelled name?
Ludwig Boltzmann
Ludwig Boltzmann. Maxwell's step was to stop following molecules one by one and give a statistical law for their speeds, which turned heat from a certainty into a matter of probabilities.
Q 29What did Maxwell sculpt in plaster in 1874 after reading the papers of Willard Gibbs?
A thermodynamic surface
A thermodynamic surface. It maps the volume, entropy and energy of an imaginary water-like substance as a landscape; he shaped it in clay with his own hands and posted a plaster cast to Gibbs at Yale.
Q 30In 1871 Maxwell returned to Cambridge as the university's first professor of which subject?
Experimental physics
Experimental physics. It was a striking post for a man famed as a theorist: he designed the university's new laboratory, watched over every step of its building and chose its apparatus before it opened in 1874.