My stress is tensor than yours

(Yeah, I know it's cliche, but somebody had to say it this semester.)
 
I'm coming to appreciate the topic of electromagnetism much more than I did before. The impression I got when I first encountered the topic was that it amounted to calculating the potential and field of a spherical conductor, capacitor, solenoid, and other such objects, given a smattering of equations to use. How enthralling.
 
It seems like electromagnetism, like mathematics, gets both better explained and more applicable as one advances through the itinerary of courses. Introductory classes in both fields mainly consist of calculating simple problems using formulae which are generally announced, then applied. In more advanced classes, they explain how those formulae came to be, and they expand the applications to topics which are more pertinent. I suppose the same can be said for computer programming, from print statements and Hello World to loops and Monte Carlo.
 
Presently, in my E&M class, we seem to be following two tracks. One consists of consolidating the myriad introductory equations into more abstract and elegant forms. The advanced introduction to E&M goes something like this in all graduate courses, as far as I can tell: electrostatics; relativity as a framework for same; whoops, magnetism fell out of my pocket while I was trying to write relativity equations about electricity. It's nice to see it instead of just being told it happens. The second track consists of applications. The derivations are broken up by examples, most of which are really cool (not just stock problems where you can simply change the numbers from the homework and get a problem for the test, as tend to be prevalent in ground-level physics courses). There's a-particle-moves-in-a-uniform-magnetic-field, and then there's how-a-magnetic-bottle-works. It's stuff I wanted to know but never got around to looking up--presented in the middle of class! I like physics classes because they tell you how the world works, as long as you don't let the formalism get in the way. It's totally worth following a long derivation as long as there's a practical example at the end of it, especially if it's something awesome like magnetic containment (something you don't want the warp core to lose).
 
Today in E&M, we talked about the Maxwell stress tensor and then about superconductivity and hovering magnets. By contrast, in quantum mechanics, we had an exam. Guess which was my favorite class today.