Abstract
It is said that, around 600 BCE, Thales of Miletus already knew that amber, when rubbed, attracts pieces of straw. Our word for electricity comes from the Greek word elektron, which means amber.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
For readers not familiar with vector calculus, the divergence and curl are defined in Sect. 5.8.
- 2.
Incidentally, John Bardeen is the only person who received twice the Nobel Prize in Physics. First time, he shared the prize with William Shockley and Walter Brattain in 1956, for the invention of the transistor.
Literature
E. Purcell, Electricity and Magnetism, 2nd edn. (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1985). A clear and rigorous introductory course on electricity and magnetism
R.P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, vol. II. (Addison Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1969). A classic textbook written in Feynman’s enthusiastic and illuminating style
L.D. Landau, E.M. Lifshitz, The Classical Theory of Fields (Pergamon, Oxford, 1980). An excellent text on the classical theory of the electromagnetic field
R.K. Pathria, Statistical Mechanics (Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford, 1996). The topics of first and second order phase transitions are clearly introduced in this book
C. Kittel, Solid State Physics, 8th edn. (Wiley, New York, 2005). Contains a very good introduction to ferromagnetism, diamagnetism, ferroelectricity, and superconductivity
J.D. Jackson, Classical Electrodynamics, 3rd edn. (Wiley, New York, 1998). An updated first-class treatise on classical electrodynamics
M. Chaichian, I. Merches, A. Tureanu, Electrodynamics (Springer, Berlin Heidelberg, 2014). This book is recommended to complement several topics dealt with in the present chapter
Y.-k. Lim (ed.), Problems and Solutions on Electromagnetism (World Scientific, 2005). Some problems from this excellent book were adapted and included
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE , part of Springer Nature
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Chaichian, M., Perez Rojas, H., Tureanu, A. (2021). Electromagnetism and Maxwell’s Equations. In: Basic Concepts in Physics. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-62313-8_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-62313-8_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-662-62312-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-662-62313-8
eBook Packages: Physics and AstronomyPhysics and Astronomy (R0)