Electrodynamics Electrodynamics

Edition: PAPERBACK

Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226519589 (Paper)
264 pages, 54 line drawings
Fall 2001

ABOUT THE BOOK
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.


Electrodynamics
Edition: HARDCOVER

ISBN: 0226519570 (Cloth)
264 pages, 54 line drawings
Fall 2001


REVIEW
"Lord Kelvin is reported as instructing that one should `not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherialization of common sense.' If this is true, then Melia's book on Electrodynamics is full of common sense etherialized. This is a graduate text which covers some notoriously `hard and crabbed' parts of electromagnetism, including time-dependent Green's functions, radiation from antennae and the Maxwell stress tensor. However, the concepts are so well explained that the clarity and elegance of the theory shines through...this book is to be recommended as a clear and entertaining exposition of some difficult, beautiful and important concepts in physics."
S. J. Blundell, (University of Oxford). See the full review in Contemporary Physics 44,
273--284 (2003).
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