Practice question · Match the pairs
Match each of Maxwell’s equations to the physical statement it encodes.
- Gauss’s law for
- Gauss’s law for
- Faraday’s law
- Ampère–Maxwell law
- There are no magnetic monopoles
- Currents and changing create
- Charges are sources of electric field
- Changing creates a circulating
Hints
- Two equations are about sources (what fields start on); two are about circulation (what stirs fields into loops).
- The "no monopoles" law is the one whose right-hand side is simply zero.
Show the answer
- Gauss’s law for → Charges are sources of electric field
- Gauss’s law for → There are no magnetic monopoles
- Faraday’s law → Changing creates a circulating
- Ampère–Maxwell law → Currents and changing create
Why
Read together, the two circulation laws form a self-sustaining loop: a changing makes an , whose change makes a …, an electromagnetic wave. Maxwell’s addition of the "changing " term is what turned four laws of circuits and magnets into a theory of light.
Practise Maxwell's Equations
The app has 8 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Physics I is free to start.
More questions on Maxwell's Equations
- Sort each Maxwell equation by whether it involves divergence or curl.
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- Order the historical development of electromagnetism leading to Maxwell's equations.
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- Order the reasoning by which Maxwell’s equations predict electromagnetic waves.
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