

The Long Road to Maxwell’s Equations - sohkamyung
http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/the-long-road-to-maxwells-equations

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shazzy
To this day, I still think derivation of the speed of light in a vacuum from
the Maxwell equations is one of the most elegant and beautiful things in
Physics.

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emcrazyone
Agreed. I went to college in the US and got a EE degree and along the way
almost switched to Applied Physics because of a really awesome professor I had
and during which the physics I was taking was making use of the EE courses I
went through. I was introduced to Elctro-mag theory from a physics class that
was again used in some of my EE classes. I still remember physics experiments
of passing current through two conductors each placed on balanced aparatus and
watching the repel and attract due to current direction.

I had (still have) a knack for math and science but I'm just so amazed by guys
like Maxwell.

The one thing that strikes me over and over is how insightful guys like
Maxwell were. At such a young age and time he was piecing together I guess
what others living at the same time might call phenomenon. Same for Einstein
and Tesla. I mean he literally devised the mathematical model that foretold
what we would discover in the future. And some 20 years later, Hans Christian
Ørsted obtained the first evidence of a link between electricity and magnetism
is quite amazing to me.

I recall reading an article some time ago about Tesla and how it was described
that Tesla literally envisioned and saw AC current and then struggled to write
it all down. I write software and I can see a similar pattern in myself. I
often know and see, in my head, how something should work is so hard to
explain. Of course at a much more basic level than these guys. It's as if
Maxwell just saw and imagine how things were connected.

I keep waiting for the link that adds gravity to the mix.

Very nice article.

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meta
I really enjoyed this book on the discovery and definition of
electromagnetism.

Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized
Physics ([http://www.amazon.com/Faraday-Maxwell-Electromagnetic-
Field-...](http://www.amazon.com/Faraday-Maxwell-Electromagnetic-Field-
Revolutionized/dp/1616149426/))

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coldcode
When I read these stories, it always amazes me how the ordinary terms we use
everyday are simply the names of the people who discovered them. That and how
difficult it was to make discoveries back then when even the math wasn't fully
formed. Today we just ask Google for anything we don't know.

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KhalilK
_when even the math wasn 't fully formed_

You'd be surprised by how much of today's used mathematics is actually "old".
I mean most of it (even the mathematics of electromagnetism) hasn't changed
since the 19th century and before, we are using the same theorems they used at
the time.

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nsrango
It depends on what you mean by fully formed. For example the idea of vectors
and quaternions, which seem so natural, is quite new (~250 years old) [1]

When maxwell derived and unified electromagnetic theory, he didn't use
constructs like the gradient and divergence of vector fields (those concepts
didn't exist), instead performing those operations 'just' partial derivatives
[2]. Sure, the math is explicitly identical, but the modern concepts of
operators on vector fields that is so powerful just didn't exist which, to me,
is rather telling about the evolution mathematical thinking: we are all doing
the same thing (and have been for a long time) but way we think about it
evolves with our notation. And notation that we are used to is actually quite
new

[1] [https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~temple/MAT21D/SUPPLEMENTARY-
AR...](https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~temple/MAT21D/SUPPLEMENTARY-
ARTICLES/Crowe_History-of-Vectors.pdf)

[2]
[http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/155/459.full....](http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/155/459.full.pdf)

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KhalilK
What a coincidence, earlier today we studied these equations in class, only we
used different names:

Maxwell-Faraday equation.

Maxwell-Gauss equation.

Maxwell-flux equation.

Maxwell-Ampère equation.

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gumby
Interesting! Are you studying in the US? I went to high school and university
in the States and never learned individual names for those equations.

But now you say this it's kind of odd -- we have Ohm's law (and pythagoras'
theorem and the Riemann function etc). What's different about these four?

(and it seems the name "Maxwell's Flux Equation" would really be simply the
description of that one rather than a name).

~~~
KhalilK
_Are you studying in the US?_

No, Tunisia, 2nd year of CPGE (Maths/Physics), French curriculum.

 _What 's different about these four?_

It's just the names, what matters is the equations themselves I believe, the
names only reflect their history (except for that third one indeed, it seems
like a description but that's the actual name used[0] )

0.[http://fr.wikiversity.org/wiki/%C3%89lectromagn%C3%A9tisme_d...](http://fr.wikiversity.org/wiki/%C3%89lectromagn%C3%A9tisme_d%C3%A9pendant_du_temps/%C3%89quations_de_Maxwell)

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CurtHagenlocher
I thought it was interesting that they felt the need to briefly explain "del".

