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//by Mary Bridget Kustusch - postdoc co-teaching the Paradigms Fall 2011//

In going through these divergence activities - particularly the Mathematica (or Maple) worksheet - there is a significant emphasis on what the divergences is **at this point**. For me, this emphasis broke through years of thinking of divergence as a property of a field to finally realizing that it is a field itself. In physics courses so often we talk about the divergence of the field for a charge distribution and treat is as a global and not a local thing. This understanding of divergence as a field made Gauss' Law so much more interesting. It means that the divergence of the field at any point tells you what the charge distribution is **at that point**.