Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Maxwell’s Aesthetics


“When he first tried to put the equations that describe the electric and magnetic fields into one system, he found a disturbing asymmetry in the forms of the equations. For purely esthetic reasons he changed the equations in order to make them more symmetric.” …Those new, esthetically modified equations went on to tell him that the speed of the waves through the fields was equal to the speed of light…

Lee Smolen, The Life of the Cosmos, Oxford, 1997 (p48)

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