Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The term "Maxwell's equations" is often also used for equivalent alternative formulations. Versions of Maxwell's equations based on the electric and magnetic scalar potentials are preferred for explicitly solving the equations as a boundary value problem, analytical mechanics, or for use in quantum mechanics.
In fact, Maxwell's equations were crucial in the historical development of special relativity. However, in the usual formulation of Maxwell's equations, their consistency with special relativity is not obvious; it can only be proven by a laborious calculation. For example, consider a conductor moving in the field of a magnet. [8]
Six readily-accessible chapters were later compiled into a book entitled Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher. Six more chapters are in the book Six Not So Easy Pieces: Einstein's Relativity, Symmetry and Space-Time.
Another of Heaviside's four equations is an amalgamation of Maxwell's law of total currents (equation "A") with Ampère's circuital law (equation "C"). This amalgamation, which Maxwell himself had actually originally made at equation (112) in "On Physical Lines of Force", is the one that modifies Ampère's Circuital Law to include Maxwell's ...
These equations can be viewed as a generalization of the vacuum Maxwell's equations which are normally formulated in the local coordinates of flat spacetime. But because general relativity dictates that the presence of electromagnetic fields (or energy / matter in general) induce curvature in spacetime, [ 1 ] Maxwell's equations in flat ...
Maxwell's equations can directly give inhomogeneous wave equations for the electric field E and magnetic field B. [1] Substituting Gauss's law for electricity and Ampère's law into the curl of Faraday's law of induction, and using the curl of the curl identity ∇ × (∇ × X) = ∇(∇ ⋅ X) − ∇ 2 X (The last term in the right side is the vector Laplacian, not Laplacian applied on ...
The structure of Maxwell relations is a statement of equality among the second derivatives for continuous functions. It follows directly from the fact that the order of differentiation of an analytic function of two variables is irrelevant (Schwarz theorem).
One of the early uses of the matrix forms of the Maxwell's equations was to study certain symmetries, and the similarities with the Dirac equation. The matrix form of the Maxwell's equations is used as a candidate for the Photon Wavefunction. [8] Historically, the geometrical optics is based on the Fermat's principle of least time. Geometrical ...