Physics Grad Programs that don't require Jackson's Electrodynamics

[twofish-quant]

Nearly every school requires a 2 semester Jackson course, but some don't even require one semester of a theoretical mechanics course. That is just offensive in my opinion. How can EM be that important?

Classical EM is a solved problem. Classical mechanics isn't. You can spend two semesters and learn "everything that's worth knowing' about classical EM, whereas you can spend decades on one aspect of classical mechanics and still not get to the bottom of it.

One analogy is that if you learn painting, a lot of teachers will have you spend inordinate amounts of times painting a sphere or a cube. Once you have that, there are some standard subjects that you'll be asked to paint (i.e. fruit baskets).

Jackson is the physics equivalent of painting a cube.

 

[SophusLies]

Classical EM is a solved problem. Classical mechanics isn't.

I definitely agree but there are still surprises out there. One of my professors showed us this article a couple days ago:

http://physics.aps.org/featured-article-pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.163901

I am also in agreement of your learning philosophy. I've always been the type that wants to learn something as deep as I can in hopes that it will pay off somewhere else. In most cases, it has paid off even in surprising ways (representation theory, Lie stuff) but in others not so much (Galois theory, number theory..). Maybe it's helped my learning abilities but sometimes it doesn't feel like it.

On another note, I loved Jackson's book mostly for the real world nasty non symmetrical problems. It made me feel like I was getting close to model an actual physical phenomenon rather than a "thought" experiment one.