“Physics in Canada” “La Physique au Canada”Book Review Critique de livre

Classical Electromagnetism in a Nutshell, by Anupam Garg, Princeton University Press, 2012, pp. 712, ISBN 9780691130187, price 144.00

Teaching a graduate course on classical electromagnetism, one often encounters the difficult task of selecting books that are best for the course. First, there is the ‘classic’ book by Jackson that is best known world-wide, and then there are the others. The goal of Jackson’s book is to provide a solid grounding with the mathematical rigor that is essential for the development of Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism. There is simply no other book that provides such a complete exposition of the topics, as one realizes that while struggling through the seemingly endless examples of the ‘Boundary-value problems’! However, in that attempt, this book has become highly compact, and quite difficult for students to get past the endless mathematical steps and appreciate the inherent beauty and wide implications of this wonderful subject in modern-day life. Some of the other books have tried to complement Jackson by presenting even more mathematical details that are left as ‘it can be readily shown’ in the text by Jackson. Best examples include books by W. Greiner (Springer), B. di Bartolo (World Scientific), among others. However, the didactic value of those books are still laudable.

Anupam Garg’s Classical Electromagnetism in a Nutshell takes a somewhat different approach. This book begins with a detailed account of vector calculus, Fourier transformation, and other essential mathematical techniques. Then the conventional topics of electrostatics, magnetostatics, time-dependent electromagnetic phenomena etc. are discussed in the usual fashion. However, the emphasis throughout has been to show their relevance in physics. In fact, this is the essence of Garg’s book where advanced students can appreciate the importance of this old subject in the modern world. For example, in the section, ‘Motion in crossed E and B fields’ (Sect 71), a discussion, albeit inadequate, is given of the Hall effect that has been a major topic of research in condensed matter for several decades. Similarly, the Hanbury-Brown and Twiss effect, the Pancharatnam phase, or the Raman scattering are topics that are barely mentioned in a book on electromagnetism, but introduced in this book. There are many such topics scattered throughout the book that bring life to the dreary mathematical equations that precede these profound phenomena. The novelty of this book is in its description of the application of electromagnetic phenomena in various branches of physics.

This 700 page tome is a fruit of hard labor by the author that can be a valuable reference book for advanced students. However, it is still not the book that will replace Jackson as the ‘ideal’ textbook, since that book is yet to be written. Nevertheless, this book provides a broader perspective of the old subject that might be beneficial for graduate students and even for beginning researchers.

Tapash Chakraborty, Professor, Tier-I Canada Research Chair, and Fellow of the American Physical SocietyUniversity of Manitoba.