Thread 16835473

>takes junior level e&m
>sees this
I thought this class was about electricity or magnets or some shit. What the fuck is the point of this shit?

>>16835473 (OP)
it do be like that

>>16835473 (OP)
Is this the faggot electron numbers? I flushed that from my memory immediately

>>16835479
Legendre polynomials

>>16835473 (OP)
>What the fuck is the point of this shit?
To understand the possible states that a particle may occupy.
>>16835479
Yeah, quantum numbers. They arise from the solutions to the wave equation with spherical boundary conditions. Very cool stuff, and OP is lucky to actually go through this somewhat properly, instead of it just being handwaved along with a thousand other seemingly random facts that most physics lecturers pull out of their asses without any explanation.

>>16835519
>muh quantum
OP is taking an E&M class and Legendre polynomials appear in even the most
trivial classical E&M problems, like a point charge off the center of your coordinate system which takes the form
[eqn] \Phi(r) = \frac{q}{4\pi \varepsilon_0}\frac{1}{\sqrt{r^2+a^2-2ar\cos\theta}}=\frac{q}{4\pi \varepsilon_0 r} \sum_{m=0}^\infty \left(\frac{a}{r}\right)^m P_m(\cos \theta) [/eqn]

How has nobody on this board taken a basic antenna class?

>>16835551
Okay... Not sure why you're getting your panties in a twist, but the P_m are quantum numbers.

>>16835473 (OP)
Anon, that is very important to filter out retards that will get themselves fried alive in no time.

>>16835551
fwiw my introductory e&m classes had these kinds of problems but didn't expand the solution into legendre polynomials

>>16835473 (OP)
yes

all of physics is just differential equations which is analysis of functions

>>16835599
Its the other way around, academic.
Theoreticians who calculate that useless shit from op picrel but dont know the first thing about actual implementation of home electricity and power lines fry themselves.

>muh quantum numbers
Anyone who parrots this shit has never taken an undergrad PDE class or is just some dumb physicist/chemist who thinks his math is somehow different from mathematicians’ math.

They’re Fourier coefficients. Read a book on harmonic analysis. Then a book on Lie theory with applications to linear PDEs.

>>16835902
did you not use griffiths?

electricity and magnetism is math
it's math all the way down, anon

>>16835473 (OP)
>I thought this class was about electricity or magnets or some shit. What the fuck is the point of this shit?
We spent the first class applying maxwell's equations to closed surfaces and loops and promptly never used them again

>>16835572
P_m(x) is a quantum number...? How the fuck is a polynomial a number, you dense cunt?