Tom Hyatt is a PhD Researcher at Liverpool John Moores University. He's also a musician and an artist. At the 2026 British Science Festival in Southampton, he’s delivering the Science and the Arts Award Lecture: Electromagnetic art.
In this guest blog for the British Science Association, Tom talks with writer and science communication trainer Alan Barker about his journey towards creating art that’s unlike any other.
Electromagnetic art
Date and time: 16 September 2026 – 13:30
Venue: Centenary Building (100) - Harvard Lecture Theatre
Alan: First question: what is Electromagnetic Art?
Tom: That’s the very question I asked myself at the outset of my PhD research project. It concerns how and why we make art using electromagnetism as a medium.
How did you get interested in this idea?
While studying for my finals in Physics and Philosophy at Oxford, I began to sketch portraits of physicists that I found inspiring between late night stints in the library. I was therefore well-primed to visit the National Portrait Gallery in London and notice the absence of Scottish mathematical physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) on display, alongside portraits of his 19th-century contemporaries such as Michael Faraday and Lord Kelvin. Looking into it further, there aren’t many portraits of him in existence, and most are derived from a few photographs.
I also discovered a stark contrast between Maxwell’s scientific legacy and knowledge of him amongst the public in general when compared to, say, Newton or Einstein. These two ‘gaps’ seemed related to me, such that creating a new portrait of Maxwell could address both. I then had the inspiration to represent Maxwell using the very thing that he himself gave us our first representation of: the electromagnetic field.
A photograph of Maxwell (sourced from The Royal Society)
You’d put Maxwell on a par with Newton and Einstein?
While science is a story written by a great many people (with the vast majority going uncelebrated at all), we often honour some individuals who make particularly revolutionary contributions to our understanding of the world. Depictions of such individuals represent not only a real person that lived, but also become emblematic of the scientific effort itself.
To link these three, Einstein himself wrote in 1931 that Maxwell had created a “change in the conception of reality” that was “the most profound and fruitful one that has come to physics since Newton”. He had pictures of both, along with Faraday, on his study wall. Despite this, Maxwell is far from being a similarly household name.
So how did Maxwell change our conception of reality?
At the turn of the 19th century, we believed electricity and magnetism to be separate phenomena. Experiments, many conducted by Faraday, began to suggest there was a link between them. By the time Maxwell began to tackle the problem, there existed many different scientific laws for electrical and magnetic phenomena but no unifying cause. Faraday had the non-mathematical intuition of a ‘field’ as being some sort of real substance that surrounds magnets or electrical charge, that brings about these observable effects.
In the mid-19th century, Maxwell successfully imagined a mechanical model of an ‘electromagnetic field’, from which he was able to mathematically derive all these known laws. By considering that the field would be elastic (i.e. stretchy), he was able to also identify light as consisting of waves in the field, too.
Maxwell’s mechanical model, with “innumerable vortices of revolving matter, their axes coinciding with the direction of the magnetic force” and “cell-walls composed of particles which are very small” and “constitute the matter of electricity”.
Why, then, is Maxwell not as well known outside of science, do you think?
Aside from pragmatic reasons like being a very humble person, spending a lot of time in rural Scotland, and dying quite young, a large part of it is that Maxwell was doing 20th-century science in a 19th-century world.
After he published his mechanical model, it was criticised for being unrealistic. He then reformulated his theory into one that didn’t depend on any specific mechanism, only describing the required behaviour (or ‘dynamics’) of the field, whatever it was made from. Even so, outside of British science the idea of an invisible ‘field’ was mostly rejected, in favour of competing ‘action-at-a-distance’ theories more akin with Newtonian gravity.
It wasn’t until Heinrich Hertz’s detection of electromagnetic waves in 1887, after Maxwell’s death, that his field became more widely adopted. It was later still, with Einstein’s relativity theory in the 20th century, that we began to accept the field as being fundamental, with no underlying mechanism. As such, Maxwell’s equations of what the field does, rather than what it is, we now appreciate as ahead of his time. This is the real change in reality that Einstein was later attributing to Maxwell.
We talk about ‘magnetic fields’ but your explanation makes the field seem really mysterious. How does this all relate to Electromagnetic Art?
Still today, understanding Maxwell’s theory requires a deep mental and perceptual shift. Take, for example, the humble magnet. We often think of it as being a ‘source’ of a magnetic field, but Maxwell’s theory tells us that it is instead channelling, twisting, and contorting a much more fundamental thing that exists separate to it, which stretches infinitely throughout the universe.
In the 20th century, we eventually came to imagine all of reality as consisting in a number of such basic, fundamental fields, all stacked and interacting with each other. It’s one thing to learn how to do the mathematics of such a science (and pass a difficult Oxford exam) but quite another to come to aesthetically and conceptually appreciate the world in the way that its theories suggest. Such a shift is as much scientific as it is artistic, and in that realisation we find the deeper meaning of ‘Electromagnetic Art’.
The 195th British Science Festival will be held in Southampton from 16 - 20 September 2026, organised by the British Science Association in partnership with the University of Southampton. All events are FREE and available to book at www.britishsciencefestival.org
Find details about all seven 2026 Award Lecturers here
Alan Barker is a writer and training consultant specialising in communication skills and science communication. Find out more about Alan’s work here
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