Maxwell's Equations

This is the first features piece I wrote while trying out, or as students here say, 'comping' for one of the literary magazines at my college. I made it past the first round, but didn't have enough time to start, let alone finish, my next piece for the final round. I'm giving it another shot this semester and I'm hoping to write about ramen, a beautiful Japanese noodle dish, which just happens to be my only true love and joy in this world. To be honest, this is a draft more than anything else and I intend to revise it someday, but, for now, here it is posted as it was first written. I didn't bother to remove the double-spacing. Here we go America. 

Maxwell’s Equations.

The following are a series of false analogies concerning physics which you do not understand.

I. Gauss's Law

The electric flux leaving a volume is proportional to the charge inside.

You were told that your dreams could not fit within the borders of The Continent. This is why the ground beneath your feet has shifted, and why the grass is no longer a parched yellow, but a nourished green. When you were younger than you are now, you dreamt of flying across the Atlantic to come here. The West. You wished to stand under vaulted, collegiate Neo-Gothic structures to breathe the thoughts of long-dead old white men. Now that this has happened, it occurs to you that you might have been trying to age into one of them. This does not equate. What is equal is the following. To the left of the equals sign: in The Continent, the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet are not the same colour as the rest of your skin. To the right of the equals sign: in The West, the rest of your skin is not the same color as the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet.

You try to explain.

First, you expand the terms on the left side. In The Continent, the palms of your hands stretched towards the sun when it glowed orange towards the evening and swiped across the sky as it purpled. You had shoes, but for some odd reason memory says otherwise, so the soles of your feet dance with the dust as you tried to awkwardly help your grandfather herd  the cows home. Your grandfather sighed because the rest of your skin screamt ‘city-child.’ Second, you expand the terms on the right. In The West, the rest of your skin is actually your body it its entirety. This body is yours, but for some odd reason memory says otherwise, so your palms pick cotton and your soles dragged across the Atlantic through slave-ships in the the water instead of commercial airplanes in the sky. But you say it took you three flights to get here.  

You try to explain.

You were taught that your thoughts are electric currents that flow through your neurons. From this you decided that the beginning and end of your everything must reside within this electricity. The electric flux leaving a volume is proportional to the charge inside.  Your everything is nothing more and nothing less than the strange happenings between positive and negative charges. This is why you try to explain your home, your body and your skin with physics which you do not understand.

II. Gauss’s Law for Magnetism

There are no magnetic monopoles; the total magnetic flux through a closed surface is zero.

There are North poles; there are South poles. They pull together if they’re different; they push apart if they’re the same. There is no such thing as a North pole existing without a South pole; there is no such things as South pole existing without a North pole.

You are black.

One night you are at party with faces that look like your and those faces are dancing. You are still. Their legs and arms swish in movements that are not intrinsic to you.  Their breath fills the air and it is thick, heavy and sweaty. The sound of the music is discordant to your ears. This aural landscape is composed of the following image-associations : hoodies, gunshots, fades, kicks, beats. More than a few girls’ asses are placed neatly in front of boys’ crotches and they rotate around one well-oiled joints. This still feels strange to you. Why? Isn’t the music of the diaspora prevalent in The Continent as well?  Back there and then, when the songs of the diaspora rappers and singers spread  through The Continent like wildfire, you figured it might be a way of returning home for them. And they were welcomed even though your body did not let you dance.  Here you are in the West with your brothers and your sisters who were taken away from you- do you not feel welcomed? Are your faces not the same?  Then, are your faces pulled together because you are different, or pulled apart because they are the same?

One afternoon  you are in the freshman dining hall with faces that look like yours and those faces are talking. You all talk about what you want to study. One wishes to study Economics and African Studies to save The Continent. Another wishes to study Medicine  and African-American studies to save The Continent in the West. You say that you want to study Physics and Philosophy because you’re looking for the true nature and structure of reality. They ask you if you’re interested in philosophy from The Continent. You blankly say that, whether we like it or not, the foundation of the modern world was built by philosophers from the West. There is a pause. You are ashamed. You quickly add that the best way of fighting The West is by knowing their ways of thinking directly and hope that this means and proves something.

One day you and a friend walk down stretches of tarred pathway cutting through the grass. Right by the corner between the big old library and your small old dormitory you find that someone has spray-painted something curious on the black tar. Beneath an arrow pointing forward, the words ‘NO N*GAS’ flash in hasty yellow curls. You lie down next to ‘NO N*GAS’ using your backpack as a pillow , relaxedly place your hands at the back of your head and flash your teeth in an aggressive brace-wire smile. You ask your friend to take a picture of this pose for your Instagram. No niggas. No North poles without South poles. No South poles without North poles. There are no magnetic monopoles;  the total magnetic flux through a closed surface is zero. Surely your blackness is the same as theirs.

III. Faraday’s Law

The voltage induced in a closed circuit is proportional to the rate of change of the magnetic flux it encloses.

“Maxwell’s Equations are a set of four differential equations that describe electromagnetism. One might shudder at first at the word ‘electromagnetism’. What  a strange unification. The world of charges and currents; sparks, fizzes and flashes. The world of poles and magnets; compasses, maps and directions. Brought together. In fact, the forces of electricity and magnetism are essentially the same force. Electricity and magnetism are just manifestations of electromagnetism in itself. Furthermore, a changing magnetic field produces an electric field and a changing electric field produces a magnetic field.”

So you think to yourself.

From the first equation, you showed that the electricity is the blackness in your mind which is tied to The Continent. It will travel with your forever, no matter what space you exist within, because the blackness you carry with you is always proportional to the blackness you were born with. From the second equation, you used magnetism to relate your blackness to the blackness of the diaspora, the blackness of The Continent to the blackness of The Continent in The West. You discovered that even though they appear to be different, they are the same blackness, because one does not exist without the other. The third equation tells you that the blackness in your mind and the blackness of your skin are the same blackness.

You cannot think your way out of your skin.

IV. Ampere’s Law

The magnetic field induced around a closed loop is proportional to the electric current plus displacement current (rate of change of electric field) it encloses.

“Maxwell’s fourth equation is symmetrical to the third equation. So they basically look the same. If you fiddle around with them a bit, and if the current density J is zero, then you can make them look exactly the same. There is then no doubt that a changing electric field produces a magnetic field, or that a changing magnetic field produces an electric field, or that electricity and magnetism basically amount to the same thing, electromagnetism. Another interesting thing that happens if you play around with the equations: you get c: the speed of light.”

So you think to yourself.

You are surprised and astonished and awed at this physics that you do not understand. From it appears a fundamental truth of the universe, the speed of light. It is the fastest anything in this space and time can ever go, the limit of everything that has been, is, and ever will be. And it is the product of your skin.

How beautiful, how terrible, how fast, how slow.

***

P.S The images for the equations are sourced from the Wikipedia page for 'Maxwell's equations'. They're rather well made...