인터넷서점 인터파크도서

Electromagnetism (E & M) is one of the pillars of classical physics. Its applications give the larger society a quality of life exceeding that of royalty a scant 200 years ago. It is a daunting task to provide, in a single textbook± ± as opposed to many monographs± ± a representative and coherent
account both of its foundations and its diverse applications.
Some 40 years ago, J. D. Jackson (now at U.C. Berkeley, then at
McGill, and later at U. Illinois, Champaign-Urbana) began the task of
defining and presenting his own view of E & M. An undergraduate electrical
engineering major, in graduate school at MIT he found physics too attractive
to resist. His background in both engineering and nuclear physics
( evolving into particle physics) gave him an unusually broad view of E & M
and served him well in developing his now-standard text, Classical Electrodynamics.
The green-covered first edition, published in 1962, was adopted
by a large number of U.S. graduate schools. The red-covered second edition,
published in 1975, was, if anything, even more successful. No other
text has so dominated the teaching of any physics graduate course; mention
``Jackson,’’ and every physicist knows you are talking about Classical
Electrodynamics . Professor Jackson has now written a third edition.
Veteran readers will immediately note that the blue-covered third edition
has larger but fewer pages and that the first ten chapters use SI, not
Gaussian units. But what deeper changes are there? Jackson makes clear
his perspective in the very first paragraph of the new Preface; E & M is an
old subject, but with time there have been ``changes in emphasis and
applications.’’ The third edition has numerous welcome new applications:
an introduction to numerical methods for solving statics problems, a discussion
of the optical fibers and dielectric waveguides upon which depends
modern wide-bandwidth communication, and a discussion of wigglers and
undulators for the high intensity synchrotron light sources that have