Is Maxwell really owner of Maxwell's Equations?
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In the words of one Richard Feynman, from Chapter 28 of The Feynman Lectures in Physics Vol. 1:
Maxwell noted that the equations for the laws that had been discovered up to this time were mutually inconsistent when he tried to put them together, and in order for the whole system to be consistent he had to add another term to the equations. With this new term came an amazing prediction, which was that a part of the electric and magnetic fields would fall off much more slowly with the distance than the inverse square, namely, inversely as the first power of the distance! And so he realized that electric currents in one place can affect other charges far away, and he predicted the basic effects with which we are familiar today - radio transmission, radar, and so on.
This additional term to Ampere's Law is discussed in the Wikipedia article on Maxwell's Equations.
So yes, the consolidation of the four separate laws discovered by Gauss, Faraday and Ampere very much is a contribution unique to Maxwell, though individual laws still carry the names of their original discoverers, and are taught in that way in elementary physics curricula.
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Source: stackoverflow.com
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