Bonus: Damon Binder on Economic History and the Future of Physics
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Maxwell's Equations Explained Electricity and Magnetism
In the early 1800s, people had worked out that electricity and magnetism were connected in some ways. What Maxwell realized is when you wrote these equations down, they were mathematically inconsistent for a fairly technical reason involving identities and what's called vector calculus. So he created like four consistent equations called Maxwell's equations that described everything that was then understood about Electricity and Magnetism. And his equations predicted the existence of light - which we later discovered.
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