Electrodynamics Notes Pdf
Vinay Pettyjohn
"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."
"Never repeat a phrase.
Never go back and ammend.
If at a loss for a word, not to ch-ch-ch or eh-eh-eh, but to stop and wait for it.
Never doubt a correction given to me by another.
These lecture notes provide a comprehensive introduction to Electromagnetism, aimed at undergraduates. Individual chapters and problem sheets are available below. The full set of lecture notes come in around 230 pages and can be downloaded here. Please do email me if you find any typos or corrections.
Essential Advanced Physics is a series comprising four parts: Classical Mechanics, Classical Electrodynamics, Quantum Mechanics and Statistical Mechanics. Each part consists of two volumes, Lecture notes and Problems with solutions, further supplemented by an additional collection of test problems and solutions available to qualifying university instructors. This volume, Classical Electrodynamics: Lecture notes is intended to be the basis for a two-semester graduate-level course on electricity and magnetism, including not only the interaction and dynamics of charged point particles, but also properties of dielectric, conducting and magnetic media. The course also covers special relativity, including its kinematics and particle-dynamics aspects, and electromagnetic radiation by relativistic particles.
Contact HOMEPublicationsTeachingMentorshipCourse NotesNewsCV HOME / Course notes Disclaimer: The following notes below are provided as-is. There are likely to be mistakes and typographic errors in the Class Notes, which were typed on the fly while straining to keep up with the Caltech fire hose. Please contact Daniel if and when you find serious conceptual or equation errors. He will likely buy you a coffee if in the area.
Provenance: Kenneth Hedberg (signature on title). Hedberg (1920-2019) graduated from Oregon State College (BS, 1943) and the California Institute of Technology (Ph. D., 1948), having studied chemistry at both institutions. While at Caltech, Hedberg studied under Verner Schomaker and interacted frequently with Linus Pauling. In 1956 Hedberg returned to Oregon State College where he joined the faculty of the chemistry department. Hedberg was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was also elected to membership of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
Few copies of these notes have survived. In his comprehensive history of the invention and use of Feynman diagrams, Drawing Theories Apart (2005), David Kaiser refers (p. 432) to a copy of the notes in the possession of Sam Schweber as the only copy he has been able to consult.
Below you will find the outline of Ph106bc. I will update the details of the topics covered in lectures and suggested reading as the term progresses. Assignments and exams will be made available via Canvas, about a week before the due date, so no effort is made here to list them.
Keep a copy of the lecture notes and problem sets handy on your computer or a USB stick. Websites go down occasionally (seemingly especially during holidays), and a very modest bit of foresight can prevent this from disrupting the problem set due date schedule. If there is a problem set update, or a lecture notes update relevant to a problem set, at a very late date and there is an outage (in the 24 hrs before a set is due), this policy will be suspended.
Besides the Griffith's textbook, I shall not use any supplementary textbooks in my class.Instead, I shall sometimes write my own supplementary notes or use some material on the Internet.The links to all such supplementary notes will be posted to this web page.
This class is officially face-to-face, but I plan to shadow all the lectures online via Zoomand have them recorded for asyncronous viewing via Canvas.I strongly encourage all students to come to the lectures in person,but if you are sick please stay home and watch the lecture online.
For students' convenience, I shall keep a log of lectures and their subjects on this web page.Since the pace of the course may change according to the students' understanding, I shall not make a complete schedule at the beginning of the class.Instead, I shall simply log every lecture after I give it.This way, if you miss a lecture, you will know what you should read in the textbook and other students' notes.
This class will have 3 exams: 2 midterm exams, and 1 final exam.Before each exam, the TA will give a review session, in which he will solve a few exam-like problems(but do not expect him to solve the actual exam problems) and answer your questions.
The brackets for converting the combined HW+MT+FIN scores into letter grades will be set afterthe final exam.HomeworkHomework is essential for learning any difficult material.Often after listening to a lecture and/or reading the textbook you may feel like you know the material,but to make this knowledge useful you must learn how to actualy apply it to solving problems,and that's what the homework is for.Without doing the homework, you will never master any Physics or Math;at best, you might have heard something about it.
To encorage you to do your homework for this class, it will comprise 20% of your grade.There will be 12 largish homework sets over the semester; 10 best sets will count towards your grade.To allow for illness or emergencies, you get to drop two worst (or missing) sets.
I shall collect the homeworks in class and give them to the TA to grade.If you cannot come to the class for any reason, put it in electronic form*and email it to me and to the TA before 5 PM on the day the homework is due.Please do not waste time asking my permission to submit your homework electronically, just scan it and email it.And do not try to submit your homework via Canvas; if you do it would probably get lost.
* If you type your homework in LaTeX, Word, or whatever, please email the PDF file.If you write it on paper, scan it (or take a clear picture with your digital camera or phone),combine all your pages into a single file (PDF or zip archive), and email that file.
Your homework should make clear what are you trying to do and why.Please comment your formulae (unless they are obvious).This way, if you make mistakes you would still get partial credit for trying to do the right thing.
Once the homeworks are collected I shall post the solutions and link them to thehomework web page.ExamsThis class has two midterm exams and one final exam at the end of the semester.Each midterm contributes 20% to your grade, and the final exam is worth 40% of the grade.
During the exam, you may use open books and/or notes.However, if your books or notes are in electronic form, they must be downloaded before the exam.To make sure your exam is your own work, the Internet connection on all laptops, tablets, etc.,must be turned off during the exam, and the cellphones must be completely turned off.
Unlike the homeworks, you do not get to drop any midterm or final exams.If you miss an exam because of a documented illness or emergency, please let me knowas soon as possible, and I'll work out an appropriate remedy.But if you miss an exam for any other reason, you would be SOL and your grade would suffer.
If you are planning to enter a graduate program in physics in the US, it is fairly certain you will (if you haven't already) hear horror stories about John David Jackson's canonical graduate electrodynamics textbook (simply referred to as "Jackson"). To me, and decades of physicists that have come before me, Jackson is the archetype of a graduate textbook: exact and comprehensive, but extremely challenging to learn from. Many graduate texts, in general, focus on rigor and completeness at the expense of pedagogy. Perhaps this would be okay, if an expert researcher in a relevant field was the professor and helped the students understand the text throughout the course. Sadly, all-too-often, the aforementioned expert researcher is largely unable to communicate effectively to the novice student. So, if lectures don't seem to help and self-study is intractable, where should one turn? How, under these circumstances, could one hope to succeed in graduate school? The answer is simple: having several high quality supplemental resources is absolutely crucial for success in graduate school.
Thus, in this post I hope to construct just such a list for the courses which are almost always required in US physics graduate programs. Namely, I will suggest resources for: classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, and statistical mechanics. I hope this list will benefit both struggling graduate students as well as motivated undergraduates that want to prepare for graduate studies. Personally, I find lengthy lists of resources somewhat overwhelming. The list that follows is not meant to be comprehensive, but rather contains many of the resources I used to get through the core courses at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Within each subsection, I attempt to order the resources by difficulty (from most accessible to least). Further, I will attempt to qualify each one when necessary. In general, though, they are all great and I hope you find them as useful as I did.
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