Maxwell’s Relations (Part 3)

In Part 2 we saw a very efficient formulation of Maxwell’s relations, from which we can easily derive their usual form. Now let’s talk more about the meaning of the Maxwell relations—both their physical meaning and their mathematical meaning. For the physical meaning, I’ll draw again from Ritchie’s paper:

• David J. Ritchie, A simple method for deriving Maxwell’s relations, American Journal of Physics 36 (1958), 760–760.

but Emily Roach pointed out that much of this can also be found in the th...