ELECTROMAGNETIC THEORY by JULIUS ADAMS STRATTON. PREFACE: The
pattern set nearly 70 years ago by Maxwell's Treatise on
Electricity and Magnetism has had a dominant influence on almost
every subse quent English and American text, persisting to the
present day. The Treatise was undertaken with the intention of
presenting a connected account of the entire known body of electric
and magnetic phenomena from the single point of view of Faraday.
Thus it contained little or no mention of the hypotheses put
forward on the Continent in earlier years by Riemann, Weber,
Kirchhoff, Helmholtz, and others. It is by no means clear that the
complete abandonment of these older theories was fortunate for the
later development of physics. So far as the purpose of the Treatise
was to disseminate the ideas of Faraday, it was undoubtedly
fulfilled; as an exposition of the author's own contributions, it
proved less successful. By and large, the theories and doctrines
peculiar to Maxwell the concept of displacement current, the
identity of light and electromagnetic vibrations appeared there in
scarcely greater completeness and perhaps in a less attractive form
than in the original memoirs. We find that all of the first volume
and a large part of the second deal with the stationary state. In
fact only a dozen pages are devoted to the general equations of the
electromagnetic field, 18 to the propagation of plane waves and the
electromagnetic theory of light, and a score more to magnetooptics,
all out of a total of 1,000. The mathematical completeness of
potential theory and the practical utility of circuit theory have
influenced English and American writers in very nearly the same
proportion since that day. Onlythe original and solitary genius of
Heaviside succeeded in breaking away from this course. For an
exploration of the fundamental content of Maxwell's equations one
must turn again to the Continent. There the work of Hertz, Poin
car6, Lorentz, Abraham, and Sommerfeld, together with their
associates and successors, has led to a vastly deeper understanding
of physical phenomena and to industrial developments of tremendous
proportions. The present volume attempts a more adequate treatment
of variable electromagnetic fields and the theory of wave
propagation. Some atten tion is given to the stationary state, but
for the purpose of introducing fundamental concepts under simple
conditions, and always with a view to later application in the
general case. The reader must possess a general knowledge of
electricity and magnetism such as may be acquired from an
elementary course based on the experimental laws of Coulomb,
Amp& re, and Faraday, followed by an intermediate course
dealing with the more general properties of circuits, with
thermionic and electronic devices, and with the elements of
electromagnetic machinery, termi nating in a formulation of
Maxwell's equations. This book takes up at that point. The first
chapter contains a general statement of the equations governing
fields and potentials, a review of the theory of units, reference
material on curvilinear coordinate systems and the elements of
tensor analysis, concluding with a formulation of the field
equations in a space-time continuum.
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