Advancing to Higher Level Electromagnetism: Is Purcell & Morin the Solution?

[bigmike94]

Hi I am coming up to the end of first year electromagnetism using the book University Physics. I will be honest there’s a lot of information crammed into a few hundred pages and it was my first ever exposure to EM. I never did it in school.

I feel like its give me a good overview but i don't feel ready for something like Griffiths yet, I am wondering if a book like Edward M. Purcell & David J. Morin Electricity and Magnetism would be a good bridging book before Griffiths as I have heard it’s level is in between that of University Physics and Griffiths?

Thanks in advance

Edit: I think also with me because I struggle with attention problems I have kind of rushed through the EM sections, the book is huge the pages are huge and the writing is tiny and there’s a lot going on with each page. It can get a bit overwhelming. I plan on reading many many textbooks so I am not too worried about gaps I have, I’m just so done with this mammoth of a book

Edit 2: I should mention that I start a first year physics course next month with my actual uni, that’s one of the reasons I have had to rush through this book, I was trying to get ahead of the game, so anything I haven’t fully grasped I should pick up during this course anyway. (My uni publishes its own textbooks that are a lot more readable than most textbooks as they’re written for distance learning)

 

[vanhees71]

I don't like Purcell's book. It's burying the physics under attempts to make it didactical.

 

[bigmike94]

I don't like Purcell's book. It's burying the physics under attempts to make it didactical.

Can you suggest another similar level textbook?

 

[vanhees71]

M. Schwartz, Principles of Electrodynamics

 

[bigmike94]

M. Schwartz, Principles of Electrodynamics

Thank you. But it seems to have strange units? I’d like to stick with SI at least for now

 

[vanhees71]

Then jump to Griffiths, which is in SI units AFAIK.

 

[robphy]

I don't like Purcell's book. It's burying the physics under attempts to make it didactical.

While not perfect, Purcell does fit as a text between typical intro texts and Griffiths's electrodynamics... and it seems (as you imply later) it is not easy to identify an alternative.

There are some relatively-new and likely-unfamiliar introductory textbooks that are worth looking into:

Tom Moore's Six Ideas That Shaped Physics Unit E (as part of a 6 part textbook)
http://www.physics.pomona.edu/sixideas/

Ruth Chabay and Bruce Sherwood's Matter and Interactions
https://matterandinteractions.org/
and its associated use of https://www.glowscript.org/ (eventually webvpython.org ).

 

[robphy]

I don't like Purcell's book. It's burying the physics under attempts to make it didactical.

Can you suggest another similar level textbook?

M. Schwartz, Principles of Electrodynamics

(my quoting attempts to capture the spirit of the conversation)

Schwartz doesn't appear to be a text similar to Purcell (as a [typical-]bridging book).

• Tensors in Ch 1 (p. 21).
• Legendre Polynomials in Ch 2 (p.81).
• "3-5 The electric and magnetic fields as elements of a second-rank tensor" (p. 126), using imaginary time-components in the field tensor

 

[vanhees71]

Schwartz is similar to Purcell in presenting classical electrodynamics as a relativistic field theory. What you list as arguments against the book are, in fact, features. The language of physics is geometry (in the sense of Klein's Erlangen program), and thus tensors are the natural way to treat electrodynamics. To avoid them makes the presentation in Purcell's book unnecessarily complicated. That's what I meant when I said it's burying the subject under didactics. Legendre polynomials are also very useful in all kinds of field theory.

Of course, you are right in critisizing the use of the $\mathrm{i} c t$ convention in Minkowski space. In this sense I agree that there is no perfect modern electrodynamics texbook at the introductory undergraduate level, and Landau Lifshitz vol. 2 remains the only really satisfactory one for the "relativity-first approach", but that's definitely a graduate-level text.

 

[Frabjous]

Feynman would be a good bridge.
https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_toc.html

 

[vanhees71]

Of course, but that's not the "relativity-first approach" as in Purcell.

 

[Mondayman]

You don't necessarily need a bridging book on E&M to learn from Griffiths. Purcell is more of an honors book. I've read elsewhere that good prep for it is actually Kleppner and Kolenkow's mechanics textbook. It gets you used to the style of problems in Purcell, which are pretty difficult apparently.

 

[robphy]

Schwartz is similar to Purcell in presenting classical electrodynamics as a relativistic field theory. What you list as arguments against the book are, in fact, features. The language of physics is geometry (in the sense of Klein's Erlangen program), and thus tensors are the natural way to treat electrodynamics. To avoid them makes the presentation in Purcell's book unnecessarily complicated. That's what I meant when I said it's burying the subject under didactics. Legendre polynomials are also very useful in all kinds of field theory.

I don't think the OP is looking for a "relativistic-bridge"
from introductory physics to Griffiths' electrodynamics book.
While Purcell attempts such a bridge,
that should be separated from other bridges that Purcell attempts.

When I use Purcell as a bridge to Griffiths,
I don't use his relativistic approach.
I do use his attempt to give the student some intuition of what divergence and curl mean
using his page of field patterns

This is not done in the typical introductory level and it's not done in Griffiths.

Tom Moore's Six Ideas That Shaped Physics Unit E (which i mentioned earlier)
uses similar ideas to try to give some intuition to divergence and curl.

When I last taught E&M, I tried to build on these idea using GeoGebra
"Vector Fields, Divergence and Curl, and Flux and Circulation Integrals (robphy)"
https://www.geogebra.org/m/vkhy5eza

Of course, you are right in critisizing the use of the $\mathrm{i} c t$ convention in Minkowski space. In this sense I agree that there is no perfect modern electrodynamics texbook at the introductory undergraduate level, and Landau Lifshitz vol. 2 remains the only really satisfactory one for the "relativity-first approach", but that's definitely a graduate-level text.

An interesting relativity-first advanced-undergraduate/graduate text is
Ingarden and Jamiolkowski's Classical Electrodynamics.
Here's a library catalog entry: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/1585791
https://www.worldcat.org/title/classical-electrodynamics/oclc/10752399
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2874274-classical-electrodynamics
Search snippets? https://books.google.com/books/about/Classical_Electrodynamics.html?id=6qAeAQAAIAAJ

It uses differential forms
(in the spirit of Bill Burke's ( https://www.ucolick.org/~burke/ )
twisted differential forms: "Div Grad Curl are Dead"
https://people.ucsc.edu/~rmont/papers/Burke_DivGradCurl.pdf )
and develops a spacetime viewpoint
before introducing Maxwell's Equations.

 

[Frabjous]

Ingarden and Jamiolkowski is an interesting text. Here is the toc (sorry about the ordering 1,3,5,2,4,6). This is not a recommendation for the OP.

 

[Frabjous]

I think we have gotten a little bit off topic. I will also recommend the old (1933) book Vector Analysis by Phillips. It will provide a good mathematical underpinning with plenty of EM discussion.

 

[physicsworks]

A long forgotten Matveev's classic text mentioned here (with a link to archive.org) is worth checking out. It is similar to Purcell in adopting "relativity-first" approach. Unfortunately, it's written in SI units (like most of modern textbooks on the subject).
Update: another classic text by Tamm, Fundamentals Of The Theory Of Electricity, uses Gaussian system of units.