Kathy Loves Physics

Category: Maxwell’s Equations

  • Misconceptions in Deriving the Poynting Vector: History and Physics

    Before I get started, I feel that I should warn you that this video is VERY fast and dense with high level physics. I basically go through the physics as if you were students in an advanced physics course on Electricity and Magnetism at an elite university. I am not saying that to discourage anyone…

  • Quaternions to Vector Analysis

    by Kathy Joseph I just finished a video on a history of the quaternions and a biography of their inventor, William Rowan Hamilton. In it, I stated, I hope pretty convincingly, that the basic features of vector algebra ALL came from Hamilton: the scalar, the vector, the dot product (or, at least the negative of…

  • Quaternions Are Amazing and So Was William Rowan Hamilton (their creator)

    A Biography and Description of Couplets, Quaternions and the life of Hamilton Before I get into quaternions and William Rowan Hamilton and why I think both are amazing, I would like to take a couple of minutes to go over why I ended up making this video. This video started because I was working on…

  • Maxwell’s Equations Explained: Supplement to the History of Maxwell’s Equation

    Introduction In this video I am going to explain the dot product, the cross product, the divergence, the curl and how it all works for Maxwell’s equations AND what Maxwell’s equations mean about magnets and light and a tiny bit about why that is important. But before I do that, I want to take a…

  • History of Maxwell’s Equations: #1 Gauss’s Law

    History of Maxwell’s Equations: #1 Gauss’s Law

    I would like to start with a little story. In the late 1950s the faculty of Caltech became concerned that the physics undergraduate curriculum was out of date and wasn’t keeping up with the exciting new developments in Physics, including the discoveries developed by one of their star professors named Richard Feynman. So, as Feynman…

  • History of Maxwell’s Equation

    History of Maxwell’s Equation

    In 1865, James Clerk Maxwell wrote his famous (or infamously difficult) Maxwells equations. These equations were to transform our world.  For example, when Einstein was asked if he stood on the shoulders of Newton, he replied, “No, on the shoulders of Maxwell”. But who was James Maxwell, why are his equations important and why did…