17.5

Maxwell's Equations

Chapter 17
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James Clerk Maxwell noticed a problem with Ampère’s law. Consider a charging capacitor: current flows in the wire toward one plate and away from the other. If you draw an Ampèrian loop around the wire, you detect current. But if you stretch your surface to pass BETWEEN the plates (where no wire exists), there’s no current — yet the loop is the same.

How did Maxwell fix this contradiction?