Maxwell’s Equations and the Wave Equation
There’s a bunch of math here, but it’s kind of a big deal. In short, it shows something really important — that light is an electromagnetic wave.
Well, let’s just get to it.
Maxwell’s Equations
I’m going to give my very brief review of Maxwell’s equations. Really, you spend one whole semester of physics just getting to this point — but we are just going to do it in a blog post.
If you need an “elevator pitch” for Maxwell’s equations — they are the four equations that show the nature of electric and magnetic field. This includes the “shape” of the fields and how to create them. Oh, I’m going to start off with integral versions of Maxwell’s Equations and then we can talk about the differential versions.
Gauss’s Law
Here is the version you see in your introductory physics course.
The left side of the equation is the electric flux over a closed surface. The flux is basically the component of the electric field that’s perpendicular to the surface integrated over the whole surface. In this equation, the integral with the circle means that…
