Interpretation of Classical Electromagnetism

Book excerpt: The aim of this book is to interpret all the laws of classical electromagnetism in a modern coherent way. In a typical undergraduate course using vector analysis, the students finally end up with Maxwell's equations, when they are often exhausted after a very long course, in which full discussions are properly given of the full range of applications of individual laws, each of which is important in its own right. As a result, many students do not appreciate how limited is the experimental evidence on the basis of which Maxwell's equations are normally developed and they do not always appre ciate the underlying unity of classical electromagnetism, before they go on to graduate courses in which Maxwell's equations are taken as axiomatic. This book is designed to be used between such an undergraduate course and graduate courses. It is written by an experimental physicist and is intended to be used by physicists, electrical engineers and applied mathematicians.