Let there be light!
I have a friend that was raised as a "young earth creationist". To her credit, she has shrugged off that indoctrination, and is struggling (with some success!) to gain some understanding of how the universe around her works.
The words "let there be light" came up in conversation this evening, which led to a discussion of the Latin words "fiat lux", (with a quick detour into "dixitque dues, fiat lux"), which to led to one of my favorite T-shirts, as seen in the photo above.
The equations in the picture are Maxwell's field equations that describe the inter-relationship between electric and magnetic fields. Partial differential equations aren't the sort of thing one usually explores over a couple of glasses of wine, so I settled for helping her understand what a "field" is. It's a good thing we stopped there, because after I thought about it a bit, I realized I couldn't explain Maxwell's equations coherently enough to be intelligible to an 8th grader. (I have a rule: If I can't explain it to an intelligent 8th grader, I probably don't understand it)
I know I have a few physics nerds lurking around, and I suspect that a few of you (like myself) have been long familiar with these equations without being able to actually explain them.
The internet to the rescue. If you have the patience to explore for 1 hour, I promise you that you'll come away with the ability to explain Maxwell's field equations to an 8th grader, and won't need to get into the gory(!!!) details of partial differentials.
Despite an infinitude of cat videos and memes, the internet remains (by orders of magnitude) the most powerful tool for obtaining knowledge that mankind has yet dreamed up.
Here's the link. (With the caveat, that this truly is for physics nerds):