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.
"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.
-- Faraday's advice to himself on lecturing.
David Tong: Lectures on Electromagnetism
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.
Content
- Div, Grad and Curl:
PDF
- 1. Introduction and Electrostatics:
PDF
Introduction; Charge, Current and Conservation; Forces and Fields; Maxwell Equations; Gauss' Law; Coulomb Law; Electrostatic Potential; Electrostatic Energy; Conductors. - 2. Magnetostatics:
PDF
Ampere's Law; The Vector Potential; Magnetic Monopoles; Gauge Transformations; Biot-Savart Law; Magnetic Dipoles; Magnetic Forces; What is a Magnet? - 3. Electrodynamics:
PDF
Faraday's Law of Induction; Inductance; Magnetostatic Energy; Resistance; Displacement Current; Light; Polarisation; Poynting Vector. - 4. Electromagnetism and Relativity:
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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. The action for relativistic particles. The Maxwell Action. The Energy Momentum Tensor and Angular Momentum. - 5. Electromagnetic Radiation:
PDF
Retarded Potentials; Green's functions for Helmholtz and Wave Equations; Dipole Radiation; Larmor Formula; Pulsars; Thomson Scattering and Rayleigh Scattering; Lienard-Wierchert Potentials; Bremsstrahlung, Cyclotron and Synchrotron Radiation. - 6. Electromagnetism in Matter:
PDF
Polarisation; Electric Displacement; Bound Currents; Macroscopic Maxwell Equations; Reflection, Refraction and the Fresnel Equations; Dispersion; Atomic Polarisability; Kramers-Kronig Relation; Drude Model for Conductors; Plasma Oscillations; Screening, Debye-Huckel Model, Thomas Fermi Theory, Lindhard Theory and Friedel Oscillations.
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
- 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.
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.