Talk:Retarded potential

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--Griffiths--

I wrote these equations in to paste them into a paper I was writing, which is due in a little over 24 hours. I will fix up the page later. I used Griffiths' Introduction to Electrodynamics (1999), and followed his notation for the most part.

Mgummess 02:24, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Need a General Explanation of Retarded Potential

It would help, if the person who wrote this item, would return and give a general, plain language explanation of the meaning of this term. I first ran across it in a two-volume work by Alfred O'Rahilly on "Electromagnetic Theory" which was first published in 1938 by Univ. of Cork Press and republished in 1965 by Dover. What I got out of it (very crudely and perhaps wrongly) was that the mathematics of EM fields should take into account the finite speed of light, so e.g. forces exerted by one object on another distant object (EM or gravity I suppose) are not instantaneously exerted between the objects where they are "now" but where they "were" at some time in the past, roughly d/c where d is the distance between them and c is the speed of light. Taylour (talk) 20:05, 18 November 2007 (UTC)