This book proposes intriguing arguments that will enable students to achieve a deeper understanding of electromagnetism, while also presenting a number of classical methods for solving difficult problems. Two chapters are devoted to relativistic electrodynamics, covering all aspects needed for a full comprehension of the nature of electric and magnetic fields and, subsequently, electrodynamics. Each of the two final chapters examines a selected experimental issue, introducing students to the work involved in actually proving a law or theory. Classical books on electricity and magnetism are mentioned in many references, helping to familiarize students with books that they will encounter in their further studies. Various problems are presented, together with their worked-out solutions. The book is based on notes from special lectures delivered by the author to students during the second year of a BSc course in Physics, but the subject matter may also be of interest to senior physicists, as many of the themes covered are completely ignored or touched only briefly in standard textbooks.
Classical Electrodynamics Books Pdf File
Classical Electrodynamics captures Schwinger's inimitable lecturing style, in which everything flows inexorably from what has gone before. Novel elements of the approach include the immediate inference of Maxwell's equations from Coulomb's law and (Galilean) relativity, the use of action and stationary principles, the central role of Green's functions both in statics and dynamics, and, throughout, the integration of mathematics and physics. Thus, physical problems in electrostatics are used to develop the properties of Bessel functions and spherical harmonics. The latter portion of the book is devoted to radiation, with rather complete treatments of synchrotron radiation and diffraction, and the formulation of the mode decomposition for waveguides and scattering. Consequently, the book provides the student with a thorough grounding in electrodynamics in particular, and in classical field theory in general, subjects with enormous practical applications, and which are essential prerequisites for the study of quantum field theory.An essential resource for both physicists and their students, the book includes a ?Reader's Guide,? which describes the major themes in each chapter, suggests a possible path through the book, and identifies topics for inclusion in, and exclusion from, a given course, depending on the instructor's preference. Carefully constructed problems complement the material of the text, and introduce new topics. The book should be of great value to all physicists, from first-year graduate students to senior researchers, and to all those interested in electrodynamics, field theory, and mathematical physics.The text for the graduate classical electrodynamics course was left unfinished upon Julian Schwinger's death in 1994, but was completed by his coauthors, who have brilliantly recreated the excitement of Schwinger's novel approach.
While the previous two editions use Gaussian units, the third uses SI units, albeit for the first ten chapters only. Jackson wrote that this is in acknowledgement of the fact virtually all undergraduate textbooks on electrodynamics employ SI units and admitted he had "betrayed" an agreement he had with Edward Purcell that they would support each other in the use of Gaussian units. In the third edition, some materials, such as those on magnetostatics and electromagnetic induction, were rearranged or rewritten, while others, such as discussions of plasma physics, were eliminated altogether. One major addition is the use of numerical techniques. More than 110 new problems were added.[11]
Ronald Fox, a professor of physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, opined that this book compares well with Classical Electricity and Magnetism by Melba Phillips and Wolfgang Panofsky, and The Classical Theory of Fields by Landau and Lifshitz.[note 2] Classical Electrodynamics is much broader and has many more problems for students to solve. Landau and Lifshitz is simply too dense to be used as a textbook for beginning graduate students. However, the problems in Jackson do not pertain to other branches of physics, such as condensed-matter physics and biophysics. For optimal results, one must fill in the steps between equations and solve a lot of practice problems. Suggested readings and references are valuable. The third edition retains the book's reputation for the difficulty of the exercises it contains, and for its tendency to treat non-obvious conclusions as self-evident. Fox stated that Jackson is the most popular text on classical electromagnetism in the post-war era and that the only other graduate book of comparable fame is Classical Mechanics by Herbert Goldstein. However, while Goldstein's text has been facing competition from Vladimir Arnold's Mathematical Methods of Classical Mechanics, Jackson remained unchallenged (as of 1999). Fox took an advanced course on electrodynamics in 1965 using the first edition of Jackson and taught graduate electrodynamics for the first time in 1978 using the second edition.[13]
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