Historically, the first example of gauge symmetry to be discovered was classical electromagnetism. A static electric field can be described in terms of an electric potential (voltage, V ) that is defined at every point in space, and in practical work it is conventional to take the Earth as a physical reference that defines the zero level of the potential, or ground. But only differences in potential are physically measurable, which is the reason that a voltmeter must have two probes, and can only report the voltage difference between them. Thus one could choose to define all voltage differences relative to some other standard, rather than the Earth, resulting in the addition of a constant offset. If the potential V is a solution to Maxwell's equations then, after this gauge transformation, the new potential V → → V + C is also a solution to Maxwell's equations and no experiment can distinguish between these two solutions. In other words, the laws of physics governing electricity and magnetism (that is, Maxwell equations) are invariant under gauge transformation. Maxwell's equations have a gauge symmetry.