Still those papers lay before me,
Problems made express to bore me,
When a silent change came o’er me,
In my hard uneasy chair.
Fire and fog, and candle faded,
Spectral forms the room invaded,
Little creatures, that paraded
On the problems lying there.
-- James Clerk Maxwell as a Cambridge undergraduate; Ode to the maths examples sheets
"He could not lecture. He seemed to have no planned course...I grew weary of seeing his demonstrator standing, with thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, almost behind the professor as the latter struggled to boil water."
-- Student evaluation of a later version of Maxwell at Cambridge.
David Tong: Lectures on IB Electromagnetism
This is an introductory course on electromagnetism given to second year undergraduates at the beginning of 2015. It assumes a prior knowledge of special relativity. Individual chapters and problem sheets are available below. The full set of lecture notes come in around 120 pages and can be downloaded here. Please do email me if you find any typos or corrections.
Content
- Div, Grad and Curl:
Postscript PDF
- 1. Introduction and Electrostatics:
Postscript PDF
Introduction; Charge, Current and Conservation; Forces and Fields; Maxwell Equations; Gauss' Law; Coulomb Law; Electrostatic Potential; Electrostatic Energy; Conductors. - 2. Magnetostatics:
Postscript PDF
Ampere's Law; The Vector Potential; Magnetic Monopoles; Gauge Transformations; Biot-Savart Law; Magnetic Dipoles; Magnetic Forces; What is a Magnet? - 3. Electrodynamics:
Postscript PDF
Faraday's Law of Induction; Inductance; Magnetostatic Energy; Resistance; Displacement Current; Light; Polarisation; Poynting Vector. - 4. Electromagnetism and Relativity:
Postscript PDF
Review of Special Relativity; Indices; Continuity Equation; Magnetism and Relativity; Maxwell Equations in Covariant Form; Gauge Transformations in Covariant Form; Lorentz Force Law; Relativistic Motion of Particles in Background Fields.
Problem Sheets
- Problem Sheet 1: Postscript PDF Electric Fields
- Problem Sheet 2: Postscript PDF Magnetic Fields
- Problem Sheet 3: Postscript PDF Electromagnetic Waves and Relativity
Electromagnetism on the Web
- The Feynman Lectures on Physics: Volume II
- The Classical Theory of Fields: Volume 2 of Landau and Lifshitz
- Electromagnetism by Alan Macfarlane. (Cambridge lecture notes from 2004)
- Classical Electrodynamics by Konstantin Likharev, Stony Brook
- Electromagnetism I and Electromagnetism II by Steven Errede, UIUC.
- Classical Electromagnetism by Richard Fitzpatrick, Texas.
- Classical Electrodynamics: by Eric Poisson, Guelph.
Some Classic Resources
- Michael Faraday's Papers at the Royal Institution
- A wiki version of James Clerk Maxwell's A Treatise on Electromagnetism. There is also a ridiculously large scanned version available here.
- Freeman Dyson's interesting essay on why Maxwell's theory is so hard to understand.