[whatshisface]

Propagation delays are missing from Columb's law, which is what you get from Maxwell's equations when you assert that everything is static (meaning, in a practical sense, that you think everything is slow-moving enough.) This can be written in either math or English - and don't think that it's never "aesthetic" to write math in English. People do it sometimes.

>More generally and abstractly, does the math have anything to say about causes, and if not, is that a limitation or a profound insight?

The most reductive way of looking at it is that physical laws are the file-compressed versions of lots and lots of lab spreadsheets. The odd part about this picture? The compression ratio is mind-boggilingly high; and even more amazingly it can often (essentially always) predict the contents of lab spreadsheets that have not already been filled. Information theory probably has something to say about how this works out but I don't know what it would be.