3 ms·

Do they? I'm not a physicist but I wonder why a friend of mine (PhD in physics @caltech) decided to take a sabbatical and "dedicate a full year" to study Maxwel

• mechanical_fish 16y ago
  Oh, I don't mean to say that undergrads finish understanding Maxwell's equations. I took about six semesters' worth of material that basically boiled down to the equations, and I came nowhere near reaching the limit. But it is true that we routinely use the equations to solve problems that were very difficult intellectual struggles for Maxwell. A big problem is that Maxwell was encumbered by his mathematics and notation - everything he did was later refactored to be more straightforward. The dev, grad, curl stuff we use today came later. We have Oliver Heaviside - a man whose name is now more famous from Cats lyrics - to thank for them.
• cabalamat 16y ago
  Even if it's not true of Maxwell, it's certainly true of Newton.