On Mon, 13 May 2007,

On 12 mai, 23:03, hetware <massl...@nutrino.none> wrote:

Is there any book on theoretical E&M which pulls it all together in a =

concise and comprehensive way?

If you want to dig in deep, "Electromagnetic Theory" by Julius Adams
Stratton. The older the issue you can lay hands on, the better.

There was only the one edition of Stratton. I checked, and IEEE/Wiley have
re-released Stratton, as of January. This is a reprint of the old 1941
edition with a couple of extra forewards, so effectively still only 1
edition.

--
Timo Nieminen - Home page:http://www.physics.uq.edu.au/people/nieminen/
E-prints:http://eprint.uq.edu.au/view/person/Nieminen,_Timo_A..html
Shrine to Spirits:http://www.users.bigpond.com/timo_nieminen/spirits.html

From the uncalled for chopping of I heard the last edition of H&R was

1. Halliday & Resnick
2. Griffiths
3. Jackson

That's the way most people get it, and imho the reason the forest gets
lost for the trees. E&M needs something clean and concise without all
the "engineering" type clutter. And (please) something that introduces
it as a _field theory_ from the very start. Not one which cements the
student with the statics mentality and then has to undo it with the time
dependent field theory part.

The right way to do it is Landau Lifshitz, but I would agree that
(especially nowadays) one would like to see the same order of
introduction in a simpler package. But the order of introduction of the
ideas is the most important thing, and L&L is the only text I've ever
seen get it right.

Field theory, with time dependence first.

Wave propagation and guage symmetry.

Spend lots of time on all the conservation properties, and (if you
can) energy transfer between magnetic and electric energy. Do the
Poynting vector and energy/momentum flux here, not later.

Then do all the statics as a special case, so people really understand
what the (1/c) d/dt << grad limit really means.

Then do the retarded potentials after the student has seen both of the
above.

Jackson's "historical approach" with all the statics first is exactly
the wrong way to do it, even if it makes more sense for engineers (and
our dear universities are invited to stop using physics courses as a
filter for engineers...)

1. Halliday & Resnick
2. Griffiths
3. Jackson

That's the way most people get it, and imho the reason the forest gets
lost for the trees. E&M needs something clean and concise without all
the "engineering" type clutter. And (please) something that introduces
it as a _field theory_ from the very start. Not one which cements the
student with the statics mentality and then has to undo it with the time
dependent field theory part.

The right way to do it is Landau Lifshitz, but I would agree that
(especially nowadays) one would like to see the same order of
introduction in a simpler package. But the order of introduction of the
ideas is the most important thing, and L&L is the only text I've ever
seen get it right.

Field theory, with time dependence first.

Wave propagation and guage symmetry.

Spend lots of time on all the conservation properties, and (if you
can) energy transfer between magnetic and electric energy. Do the
Poynting vector and energy/momentum flux here, not later.

Then do all the statics as a special case, so people really understand
what the (1/c) d/dt << grad limit really means.

Then do the retarded potentials after the student has seen both of the
above.

Jackson's "historical approach" with all the statics first is exactly
the wrong way to do it, even if it makes more sense for engineers (and
our dear universities are invited to stop using physics courses as a
filter for engineers...)

Absolute agreement.

In this line of reasoning, I also recommend
"University Physics" by Sears Zermansky and Young,
published by Addison Wesley

I also like "University Physics" by Harris Benson, Wiley&Sons

André Michaud