Electrodynamics (Chicago Lectures in Physics) 1st Edition by Fulvio Melia (PDF)

Description

Practically all of modern physics deals with fields—functions of space (or spacetime) that give the value of a certain quantity, such as the temperature, in terms of its location within a prescribed volume. Electrodynamics is a comprehensive study of the field produced by (and interacting with) charged particles, which in practice means almost all matter.Fulvio Melia’s Electrodynamics offers a concise, compact, yet complete treatment of this important branch of physics. Unlike most of the standard texts, Electrodynamics neither assumes familiarity with basic concepts nor ends before reaching advanced theoretical principles. Instead this book takes a continuous approach, leading the reader from fundamental physical principles through to a relativistic Lagrangian formalism that overlaps with the field theoretic techniques used in other branches of advanced physics. Avoiding unnecessary technical details and calculations, Electrodynamics will serve both as a useful supplemental text for graduate and advanced undergraduate students and as a helpful overview for physicists who specialize in other fields.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: About the Author Fulvio Melia is professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Arizona and author of numerous books, including, most recently, The Galactic Supermassive Black Hole.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This is probably the best and most essential _guidebook_ on advanced classical electromagnetic theory I’ve seen (not to mention the cheapest by far), with an emphasis on radiation. I call it a “guidebook”, because it is generally brief, and there are no practice problems. But the treatment of radiation from moving charges, particularly the covariant formulation, is quite detailed and clear. I wish I had this book when I was in grad school. We of course used Jackson, which is a bit heavy going, and often you can’t see the forest for the trees.To most easily profit from Melia’s book, you should have already completedf a course at the level of Wangsness or Griffiths. (btw, if you haven’t, I’d recommend the much cheaper, and very good undergraduate treatment in The Electromagnetic Field, by Shadowitz, reprinted by Dover.) You will also need to supplement this book with other material and practice problems. Jackson is standard, but if you don’t have it, you can save a lot of money by going for Dover’s reprints of Panofsky and Phillips, and Heald and Marion, two excellent texts (the latter also emphasizing radiation).If you want a complete, but uncluttered, narrative of the development from Maxwell’s equations and the retarded potentials, to multipoles, to the Lienard-Wiechert solutions and the covariant Lagrangian, this is the book for you.

⭐The book is short and is not clattered by non-essential topics. In this way, the structure of electrodynamics can stand out. The author often pauses and examines the physical contents of equations derived. He also tries to motivate a derivation on physical grounds. I like that. The explanation, however, isn’t always as direct as it could be and occasionally mixes up different issues, thus leaving the act of distilling the contents to the reader. I suppose everyone has to do that anyway to learn from a book. But, it does mean that the book needs to be read slowly and critically.In many places, explanation was rather contracted or was given hurriedly. This being a graduate level textbook and thus is building on an assumed prior exposure to the subject, this might be expected. But, in a few places, a physical situation being analyzed was not fully explained or the notation was not carefully chosen to convey physics. His treatment of time-varying field in Sec. 3.1 was (and still is) utterly confusing to me. For that, I consulted Panofsky and Phillips and found it to be a great help.In summary, I appreciate the underlying motivation of the book, that is to provide a compact, yet, complete account of electrodynamics. However, the book is not without some rough edges, except perhaps to those who know the materials inside out. For mere mortals, such as myself, it won’t be a bad idea to get something like Panofsky and Phillips as a supplement.Based on another review, I got a hardcover copy. It costs twice as much, but it is printed on high quality paper and binding is just excellent. I don’t think that the pages will ever fall out from a regular use. It has a good weight in hands and gold lettering (on the back only) complements the black cover very nicely.

⭐This book can be used as a reminder of the most important results on electrodynamics. Being brief, not all equations are derived, so one might lack insight on the difficulty of some of the computations required to obtain the presented laws. What I liked the most about this book is that the autor gives detailed explanations on the physical content of the equations, and that he derives the relativistic Green function in order to study radiation properly.

⭐-The paperback edition:After a month of using it -and rarely used- the cover and back started to fall apart curving and piling dramatically which has turned the book in almost unusable book (see the photo in this page at the beginning…)-About the text:First this a graduate text so if you are undergraduate or self-learning study, skip this book and go for another.For graduate: Well, It is not a bad book but I rather prefer

⭐by Panofsky and Phillips the topics are worked in more detail and clearer.I hope this can help.

⭐An excellent, concise but complete exposition. An outstanding text for review, perhaps a bit too condensed for a first course. The reader should already know most of the necessary math.

⭐It’s nice to have as a review/summary sort of book. Not for a good reference book but good enough as a nice reminder of this subject.

⭐This is the best book I have on Electrodynamics. It draws out the intuition with good diagrams that motivate the formulas. The formulas are carefully derived and explained. The book I would like to have written.

⭐Electrodynamics by Fulvio Melia is a good book. It actually treat the special relativity part of the course in-depth.

⭐Las explicaciones son concisas y van al grano. La selección de temas es apropiada para un curso avanzado de electrodinámica.No hay mucho mas que decir. Es un libro magnífico: conciso y completo, muy recomandable para usarse como libro de texto o estudio personal.

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