On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 6:28 AM, Knud Soerensen <[email protected]> wrote: > Walter Bright wrote: >> >> ... would dare to wear a Maxwell's Equations t-shirt. >> >> http://www.cafepress.com/digitalmars > > I actually had a t-shirt which said > > God said: > <insert Maxwell's equation> > and there was light > > But I would not were it today
I was thinking the same thing. Maybe it's something that seems more appealing to a college student just learning that stuff, but to me it seems like a fairly boring old set of differential equations now. > when I know that Maxwell's equations don't > describe all electromagnetic experiments. Well, that wasn't quite my reason. > See http://www.scribd.com/doc/4445/quaternionic-electrodynamics Interesting. The other interesting developement these days seems to be describing things using the math of differential forms and/or geometric algebra. Instead of div grad curl, and all that. Hmm the biquaternions in your reference seem to be related to this... I see both "geometry algebra" and "biquaternions" associated with "Clifford algebra" in google searches. Don't really understand all that stuff myself, but I'm interested in learning more. The SIGGRAPH course notes for the Discrete Differential Geometry course have a paper by Desbrun on differential forms that I was reading through the other day. http://www.geometry.caltech.edu/pubs/GSD06.pdf Here's a quote I just found: """ The elegance of geometric algebra is clearly evident in that fact that Maxwell's equations become a single equation in this algebra. """ http://jtauber.com/blog/2004/03/27/geometric_algebra/ And here's that equation, apparently: http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/2/a/8/2a875588f083c9242880671dc49ed8d0.png Maybe it doesn't make for quite as interesting a T-shirt though... but still it puts you one-up over those guys wearing Maxwell's equations written in component form. That's sooo passe. And any run-of-the-mill nerd recognizes the component form. To be a true uber-elite nerd you need to wear the geometric algebra Maxwell's equation. Heh. You make that shirt, and I just might buy it. :-) --bb
