History of NUI Galway, the Science Faculty and associated scientists.

Joseph Larmor (1857-1942)

Joseph Larmor was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and the Queen’s College Belfast.  He then took another degree at St. John’s College Cambridge, as was common for promising young students from provincial universities.  He won top prize at the final mathematical examination in Cambridge.  This was the second year in a row that a student from Belfast had been crowned "senior wrangler".  Larmor then returned to Ireland as Professor of Natural Philosophy at Queen’s College Galway.  He held this position for five years but then returned to Cambridge to take up a new Mathematics position and he was later appointed to the prestigious Lucasian Chair of Mathematics. 

Larmor is well known for his contributions to the theory of electromagnetism, in particular the electron theory of matter.  Larmor published his collected papers on electromagnetism in 1900 in a famous book entitled "Aether and Matter".  He was the first person to explain why a compass needle works.  Larmor’s work, though rooted in the classical physics in which he had been trained, eventually led to the breakdown of classical physics and the rise of relativity theory and quantum mechanics.  He was described as ’one who rekindled the dying embers of the old physics to prepare the advent of the new’. 

Larmor saw himself as part of an Irish scientific tradition and was involved in editing the collected works of a number of Irish scientists. 

Larmor spent most of his career in Great Britain but returned to Ireland most summers and moved back permanently after his retirement from the Lucasian chair.  He was committed to the Union of Ireland with Great Britain and this led him to serve in Parliament as a member for Cambridge University from 1911 to 1922. 

Sources:

Irish Innovators in Science and Technology.  Published jointly by the Royal Irish Academy and Enterprise Ireland, an updated and enlarged version of the two-volume People and Places in Irish Science & Technology published in 1985 and 1990.  Charles Mollan, William Davis and Brendan Finucane (eds), Royal Irish Academy and Enterprise Ireland, Dublin 2002.

Mary Mulvihill, Ingenious Ireland: A county-by-county exploration of Irish mysteries and marvels, Townhouse Publishers, Dublin 2002.

Further Reading:

Jed Z. Buchwald : From Maxwell to Microphysics, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1985. 

Arthur S. Eddington: Joseph Larmor, Obituary Notices of the Fellows of the Royal Society, 4 197-207, 1944.

Joseph Larmor: Aether and Matter, Cambridge, 1900.

Andrew Warwick: Frequency, Theorem and Formula: Remembering Joseph Larmor in Electromagnetic Theory, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 47, 49-60, 1993. 

Tom O’Connor: Natural Philosophy/Physics, From Queen’s College to National University, Tadhg Foley (ed), Four Courts Press, Dublin 1999.

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