Maxwell's Equations

A note from the Editor: In celebration of the 150th Anniversary of Maxwell’s Equations, we are honored to bring you a chapter from the book The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, the 1882 original biography of James Clerk Maxwell. This chapter, entitled “Faraday’s Lines of Force and Maxwell’s Theory of the Electromagnetic Field,” provides a unique insight to Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetic fields.

The Method of Moments has become one of the most powerful tools in the RF engineer’s arsenal. In this chapter, we make the transition from theory to practice, first by attempting to compute the characteristics of a “short dipole” by hand, and then by demonstrating that a computer can do that in just a few seconds.

It is time to put these equations to work by computing the radiation from a simple structure, a short wire element.

In the preceding chapters we have derived Maxwell’s Equations and expressed them in their “integral” and “differential” form. In different ways, both forms lend themselves to a certain intuitive understanding of the nature of electromagnetic fields and waves. In this installment, we will express Maxwell’s Equations in their “computational form,” a form that allows our computers to do the work.