Text extracted from opening pages of book: ELECTROMAGNETIC THEORY
BY JULIUS ADAMS STRATTON Professor of Physics Massachusetts
Institute of Technology McGRAW-HILL BOOK COMPANY NEW YOBK AND
LONDON 1941 ELECTROMAGNETIC THEORY COPYRIGHT, 1941, BY THE
McGRAw-HiLL BOOK COMPANY, INC. PBINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OP
AMERICA All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not
be reproduced in any form without permission of the publishers.
PREFACE The pattern set nearly 70 years ago by Maxwell's Treatise
on Electric ity 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 devotedto 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. Only the 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, Vi
PREFACE 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, areview 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. The second chapter is also
general in char acter, and much of it may be omitted on a first
reading. Here one will find a discussion of fundamental field
properties that may be deduced without reference to particular
coordinate systems. A dimensional analysis of Maxwell's equations
leads to basic definitions of the vectors E and B, and an
investigation of the energy r
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
(4)
(3)
