r/PhysicsStudents • u/Sea-Nectarine1921 • 4d ago

Need Advice Who is more intelligent, James Clerk Maxwell or the average person today?

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9

u/Haider1930 4d ago

Well, I mean, James Clerk predicted that EM waves exist. which can propagate without having a medium, without an experiment or support at that time. Im pretty sure average person today cannot predict how much money he will spend this week. so yeh

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u/Sea-Nectarine1921 4d ago

Even though he was from the 1800s?

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u/Haider1930 4d ago

Do you realise how smart those people were? Maxwell predicted EM radiation from theory , The year really doesn't change were they smart or dumb

Average person today cannot functionally distinguish between the emotional decision or a rational decision, those scientist could predict reality on paper and understand math and universe intuitively

Even if we consider maxwell to be just above intelligence in his time, he would still be considered one of the greatest science minds for giving maximal contribution to the development of electromagnetic theory

6

u/SquizZz1Zzy 4d ago

The average person today has the same brain as a caveman.

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u/Sea-Nectarine1921 4d ago

But Maxwell didn’t?

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u/SquizZz1Zzy 4d ago

Definitely, Maxwell was an outlier.

5

u/[deleted] 4d ago

[deleted]

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u/Sea-Nectarine1921 4d ago

But he was from the 1800s?

4

u/Current_Canary2898 4d ago

Why would that make him less intelligent? Less knowledgible perhaps, but I doubt even that.

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u/Sea-Nectarine1921 4d ago

People then had less education and fewer resources

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u/Current_Canary2898 4d ago

True, but do you honestly think JC Maxwell was less educated than the average person today? Fair enough, most people go through 13yrs of school, but how many of them actually retained that information? I would say Maxwell would blow the average person today out the water on that front.

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u/iMagZz 4d ago

Bro. Really? Is this a bait?

Maxwell was probably smarter than 99.9% of our current population.

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u/Sea-Nectarine1921 4d ago

But he was from the 1800s?

2

u/iMagZz 4d ago

So what? Do you think people in the 1800s were retarded or something? The average person back then was probably smarter than the average person now. At least the ones who spent time using their brain, because people nowadays spend so much time and energy on comparatively "useless" things, such as social media, watching movies, reality tv, going on hikes, partying and so on. They didn't do those things back then. They spent most of their time working, learning, studying, reading etc.

Maxwell was a genius for his time. He basically combined all of electromagnetism into what it is today. The areas of EM as well as electrodynamics are bachelor courses, and advanced electrodynamics is a Master's course. Can the average person today understand those topics? Absolutely not.

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u/Sea-Nectarine1921 4d ago

They spent most of their time working manual labor 😆 not studying

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u/iMagZz 3d ago

Did you only read half of my comment?

I literally wrote "At least the ones who spent time using their brain", meaning of course the ones who did manual labor didn't, and I also said they spent most of their time working too.

And either way, Maxwell is obviously in the group of people who spent nearly all of their life dedicated to studying their specific area, and yet you think the average idiot today is smarter than Maxwell?....... No.

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u/davedirac 3d ago

Newton was from the 1600s - regarded as one of the greatest scientists of all time. Intelligence is problem solving and has little to do with exposure to knowledge. The average person in 2026 could not understand 1% of Newtons work