Introduction

Every so often I’ll be in a physics class, or a math class, and we’ll talk about something that bridges the two in a beautiful WOW moment. Math is of course the natural language of physics, but sometimes I forget that they are linked as fundamentally as they are. A moment like this happened today that I thought was especially interesting because not only does it connect the abstract and general wave equation from partial differential equations to actual electromagnetic waves, it also makes manifest the fundamental relationship between the speed of light and electricity and magneticsm. It’s that observation – the ubiquity of the speed of light in all of E&M – that motivated Einstein’s discovery of special relativity.