When Basic Physics Secretly Rewrites the World

James Clerk Maxwell sat down in 1865 to write a unified theory of electricity and magnetism, and inadvertently wrote the blueprint for the modern world. Not because he intended to. Because that's how this works.

Don Lincoln, a particle physicist at Fermilab, lays this out with the particular pleasure of someone who has spent decades in the business of not knowing what he's doing — in the best possible sense. Speaking on the Lex Fridman Podcast, Lincoln describes what happens when you take Maxwell's equations and apply calculus: the laws of electricity and the laws of magnetism, combined, produce a wave equation. Fields oscillate. Waves propagate. And the speed at which they move turns out to be 299,792,458 meters per second — the speed of light. Maxwell didn't go looking for light. He was trying to make sense of magnets.

"People said, 'Wow, the speed of light comes out of those equations,'" Lincoln recalls. "And that had to be, I think, very persuasive."

That's an understatement calibrated for a physicist. What it actually was: a moment when two seemingly separate pieces of reality collapsed into one. Electricity. Magnetism. Light. The same thing, viewed from different angles. It's worth sitting with how disorienting that must have been in 1865, before we'd domesticated any of it.

A note on attribution that matters: while Maxwell published the foundational theory in "A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field" in 1865, the tidy set of four equations most physics students encounter today was actually the work of Oliver Heaviside, who reformulated Maxwell's original twenty-odd equations in the 1880s. The insight was Maxwell's; the elegant shorthand came later. This is a minor distinction to most readers and a significant one to historians of science — and it actually sharpens Lincoln's point rather than softening it. The most consequential ideas don't arrive fully formed. They get worked over, simplified, weaponized for use.

Lincoln's argument, as he builds it, is essentially this: curiosity-driven research produces outcomes so distant from their origins that no one funding it could have predicted them. "Why are you messing around with magnets and sparks and who cares?" was the reasonable question of the 1800s. The answer, per Lincoln, is our entire technological civilization. He's not being hyperbolic. The speed of electricity — that near-light-speed propagation through conductive material — is the physical fact that makes everything from power grids to the internet possible. Without the basic science, none of the applied science exists.

That argument deserves to be taken seriously, and also pressed. Lincoln is making two related but distinct claims. The first is empirical: fundamental research has, historically, produced transformative applications. This is clearly true. The second is a policy inference: therefore, we should fund fundamental research even when its applications are invisible. This is almost certainly also true, but it requires more than examples to establish. Every field of inquiry can point to its Maxwell moments. The question of which fundamental science to fund, at what scale, and at the expense of what else — that's where the argument actually lives, and Lincoln is generous enough to acknowledge he doesn't know the answer to what his own quark research might eventually produce.

This is where Lincoln's framing, as a physicist, is necessarily incomplete — and where I find myself reading his words from a different vantage point entirely.

When Lincoln says nuclear power "may be the path that we take as we move away from digging fossil fuels out of the ground," I hear a statement that is technically accurate, cautiously framed, and radically underspecified given where we actually are. We are not deciding in the abstract whether nuclear might be useful someday. We are in the middle of an energy transition with a timeline that is not theoretical. The IEA's 2023 World Energy Outlook found that to hold warming to 1.5°C, global emissions need to halve by 2030. That is six years from the time of this writing. The average lead time for a new nuclear fission plant — from planning to grid connection — is currently running fifteen to twenty years in most Western countries, and costs have ballooned enough to bankrupt utilities. South Korea and France, who never lost the industrial muscle memory for building reactors, are the exceptions that prove the rule.

None of this means nuclear is irrelevant to the energy transition. Extending the operating lives of existing plants is genuinely important, and small modular reactors remain a credible medium-term bet — though one still waiting on commercial demonstration. Fusion has cleared some remarkable milestones, including NIF's ignition breakthrough in late 2022 and subsequent follow-on shots, but commercial-scale fusion still doesn't have a delivery date anyone can responsibly quote. Lincoln's framing — "it gives us something we didn't have before" — is exactly right as a description of what nuclear physics contributed to human options. It is not, on its own, a climate strategy.

The gap between those two things is where I spend most of my working life.

Here's what Lincoln's history of Maxwell actually illuminates for me, as someone tracking the energy transition: the technologies most likely to determine whether we hold 1.5°C or blow past it are probably not the ones currently receiving the most attention or capital. Solar and wind are transformative and necessary and, critically, known — we are scaling them with existing understanding. But the gaps in climate mitigation that don't yet have solutions — long-duration energy storage, direct air capture at meaningful scale, green hydrogen cost curves, transmission infrastructure, grid architecture for a distributed system — some of these have known engineering paths and some of them might require a Maxwell moment we haven't had yet.

The nuclear physics that Lincoln invokes took roughly two decades from theoretical foundation (Rutherford's nuclear model emerged around 1911, Chadwick discovered the neutron in 1932, fission was demonstrated in 1938) to the first reactor going critical in 1942. That's fast by historical standards, and it happened under conditions of extraordinary resource mobilization. The climate problem has a similar resource mobilization window — and a much longer list of unknowns.

"This digging into deep fundamental, not understood, mysterious things can 100 or 200 years later transform the world," Lincoln says. He means it as inspiration. I take it as a planning problem.

We are not, as a civilization, particularly good at identifying which unknowns to invest in before we know what they're for. The United States has been cutting basic research budgets in real terms for years. The DOE's Office of Science — which funds exactly the kind of fundamental physics Lincoln is describing — has faced sustained pressure. Climate research specifically, including early-stage work on carbon chemistry, soil carbon dynamics, and atmospheric physics, operates under constant defunding risk because it cannot articulate its ROI in the timeframes that budget cycles demand. Maxwell couldn't have either.

So the question I keep returning to, after listening to Lincoln make a genuinely compelling case for the long game: which piece of foundational climate science are we currently treating the way the Victorians treated magnets and sparks? What is the thing that looks, right now, like it has nothing to do with anything — and might, in twenty or thirty years, be the thing we wish we'd understood sooner?

We don't get to know. That's the whole point. But the answer to that uncertainty is not to wait and see. Maxwell didn't wait. He did the math.

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Olivia Meng is a climate and environment correspondent at Buzzrag.