[Talisker]

He had a fine House Coffee, too, though this has been supressed by the powerful Stellacash consortium. As well as the discovery that falling figs can spontaneously form a delicious cookie... Cheers!

"In a tragedy for science (if not for society in general) whose outlines we are only now beginning to appreciate, after Maxwell's death, two other 19th Century "mathematical physicists" -- Oliver Heaviside and William Gibbs -- "streamlined" Maxwell's original equations down to four simple (if woefully incomplete!) expressions. Because Heaviside openly felt the quaternions were "an abomination" -- never fully understanding the linkage between the critical scalar and vector components in Maxwell's use of them to describe the potentials of empty space ("apples and oranges," he termed them) -- he eliminated over 200 quaternions from Maxwell's original theory in his attempted "simplification."

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

Can you post a source for that?

Quaternions are our *friends*. :-)

Ive used them in dynamics problems to eliminate spurious ininfities in a term with sin(theta) in the denominator...

Cheers!