/sci/ - Science & Math

I'm just gonna left this here:

back in the 1900s the consensus was that the ether must exist, even after the michelson-morley experiment the scientific community still belived that theres must be a substrata for the propagation of EM "waves".

maxwell, faraday... even einstein belived that the ether must exist it was only around the 1930s that the ether consensus started to change.

this post is not about the ether, its about "scientific consensus".

>what's the difference
They are just two different things described and mixed by Maxwell's equations. I can only give anecdotes, for exmaple you see that the divergence of the E field is free charge, whereas the divergence of the B field is 0, meaing that there are no magnetic sources or sinks ("monopoles").

Best way to self teach/learn Maxwell's Equation for a math undergrad?

I'm trying to understand Maxwell's Equations so I can at least somewhat be on track with MIT's OCW 6.002.

What knowledge is a prerequisite for understanding this stuff? I honestly don't know what a single variable in the equation represents or where to get its value.