Customer Reviews

Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, Vol. 2

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Whenever I teach a course which touches on electric or magnetic phenomena I find myself going through this book. It works well with the early chapters of Jackson, in particular, and Smythe. Maxwell knew the subject thoroughly, up to the 1870s (and much of this material has since dropped out of courses and almost out of memory), his thinking was both profound and clear, and he may well be the best writer on physics in the English language. His proofs are economical and elegant. Oh yes - this book is still a good reference for the treatment of spherical harmonics and multipole expansions in Cartesian coordinates.

The book in my opinion coming from a calculus III student is very rigorous and one needs to have a firm foundation on Mathematics I would say about calc III or better to even try to read this book. So far I have just started but every page is exciting because he goes into a deep explanation of what is happening and going on physically and mathematically. Not to mentioned his work is very organized.

The theory of electromagnetic fields was written already around 1880. This was made by Maxwell whose very original ideas are found in this treatise. To read it takes a little time as there are applied terminology and units not any more valid. However,
after carefull reading it gives out the idea of field theory. The electrostatics and electrokinematics are represented in vol 1. The theory developed Maxwell is a masterpiece of physics and will certainly have a stable position in history of natural sciences.

I suggest that some reviewers miss the significance of Maxwell's book Electricity and Magnetism.

First, it introduced "Dimensional Analysis" which is the standard against which ALL physics models must be tested.

Equations are maths.
Units are politics.
Dimensional Analysis is physics.
( If a model doesn't fit Maxwell's Dimensions, it is not correct.)

Secondly, Maxwell established the framework for Quantum Mechanics when he showed that statistics, rather than two-body math, is required to model multi-body systems.

Thirdly, Maxwell established the framework for modern atomic theory by postulating dimensionless points, and assembling the
points into atoms, molecules, and larger structures, while leaving room for finer complex assembles of points such as quarks and neutrinos.

Fourthly, Maxwell laid the ground work for the Bose-Einstein and Fermi-Dirac distributions, which are slight modifications of Maxwell's distribution to account for the separation of matter into two classes, bosons and fermions.

Fifthly, Einstein's much touted paper on Brownian movement is a variation of Maxwell's more comprehensive treatment of the
velocity distribution of particles.

Just as most historians parrot Herodotus, most physicists parrot Maxwell, but none come close to the masters.
Maxwell was the fountainhead of modern physics, and this book is his best.

It's reading such a book we can understand how powerfull was the 19th Century scientific thought. Maxwell, was a genius as was Newton and Einstein, his book is didactic and clear. A must have.

This book deals with what most students around the world claim to have understood but ignore basic facts about it .Read about electromagnetism from its discoverer and you will realise that it is not difficult to ask for the whole truth. Some not all parts of the book will surprise you but these few parts really do give an insight to what Maxwell equations reveal and why scientists did teach this subject the good old way with magnetic poles , the eather e.t.c. Imagination is a virtue of the true scientist

There's alot of interesting stuff here. Very informative about history yes, but it is still probably the best text on eletromagnetic theory. There is some advanced math in here. I only read part of it for a research project(its huge). From this(and the equation contained within) came the basis for all of modern physics. Maxwell's equations are inconsistent in some ways with classical mechanics. To compensate, physicists had to create relatvity and quantum mechanics. Maxwell's work was not all new stuff. He took other people's theories and summed them up in his book. He then predicted the existence of EM waves and such .