Classical Electrodynamics


Book Description




Physics of Elementary Particles


Book Description

This is an introductory account of the physics of elementary particles and their interactions, with a minimum of formal apparatus and an ease of reading which, at present, is found in few other books in physics. It is designed for graduate students and for physicists not specializing in the field. The various phenomena are interpreted and correlated largely by means of elementary theoretical arguments needing little background beyond a first course in quantum mechanics. Numerous references to the original literature will allow the reader to probe more deeply into the topics discussed. Selected topics include scattering, photoproduction, K-mesons and hyperons, theoretical models, weak decay processes, and analysis of recent experiments on nonconservation of parity. Originally published in 1958. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.




Modern Electrodynamics


Book Description

An engaging writing style and a strong focus on the physics make this graduate-level textbook a must-have for electromagnetism students.




Thin Description


Book Description

The African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem are often dismissed as a fringe cult for their beliefs that African Americans are descendants of the ancient Israelites and that veganism leads to immortality. But John L. Jackson questions what “fringe” means in a world where cultural practices of every stripe circulate freely on the Internet. In this poignant and sophisticated examination of the limits of ethnography, the reader is invited into the visionary, sometimes vexing world of the AHIJ. Jackson challenges what Clifford Geertz called the “thick description” of anthropological research through a multidisciplinary investigation of how the AHIJ use media and technology to define their public image in the twenty-first century. Moving far beyond the “modest witness” of nineteenth-century scientific discourse or the “thick descriptions” of twentieth-century anthropology, Jackson insists that Geertzian thickness is an impossibility, especially in a world where the anthropologist’s subject is a self-aware subject—one who crafts his own autoethnography while critically consuming the ethnographer’s offerings. Thin Description takes as its topic a group situated along the fault lines of several diasporas—African, American, Jewish—and provides an anthropological account of how race, religion, and ethnographic representation must be understood anew in the twenty-first century lest we reenact old mistakes in the study of black humanity.




American Lion


Book Description

The definitive biography of a larger-than-life president who defied norms, divided a nation, and changed Washington forever Andrew Jackson, his intimate circle of friends, and his tumultuous times are at the heart of this remarkable book about the man who rose from nothing to create the modern presidency. Beloved and hated, venerated and reviled, Andrew Jackson was an orphan who fought his way to the pinnacle of power, bending the nation to his will in the cause of democracy. Jackson’s election in 1828 ushered in a new and lasting era in which the people, not distant elites, were the guiding force in American politics. Democracy made its stand in the Jackson years, and he gave voice to the hopes and the fears of a restless, changing nation facing challenging times at home and threats abroad. To tell the saga of Jackson’s presidency, acclaimed author Jon Meacham goes inside the Jackson White House. Drawing on newly discovered family letters and papers, he details the human drama–the family, the women, and the inner circle of advisers– that shaped Jackson’s private world through years of storm and victory. One of our most significant yet dimly recalled presidents, Jackson was a battle-hardened warrior, the founder of the Democratic Party, and the architect of the presidency as we know it. His story is one of violence, sex, courage, and tragedy. With his powerful persona, his evident bravery, and his mystical connection to the people, Jackson moved the White House from the periphery of government to the center of national action, articulating a vision of change that challenged entrenched interests to heed the popular will– or face his formidable wrath. The greatest of the presidents who have followed Jackson in the White House–from Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt to FDR to Truman–have found inspiration in his example, and virtue in his vision. Jackson was the most contradictory of men. The architect of the removal of Indians from their native lands, he was warmly sentimental and risked everything to give more power to ordinary citizens. He was, in short, a lot like his country: alternately kind and vicious, brilliant and blind; and a man who fought a lifelong war to keep the republic safe–no matter what it took.




John David Jackson


Book Description

A Course in Quantum Mechanics Unique graduate-level textbook on quantum mechanics by John David Jackson, author of the renowned Classical Electrodynamics A Course in Quantum Mechanics is drawn directly from J. D. Jackson’s detailed lecture notes and problem sets. It is edited by his colleague and former student Robert N. Cahn, who has taken care to preserve Jackson’s unique style. The textbook is notable for its original problems focused on real applications, with many addressing published data in accompanying tables and figures. Solutions are provided for problems that are critical for understanding the material and that lead to the most important physical consequences. Overall, the text is comprehensive and comprehensible; derivations and calculations come with clearly explained steps. More than 120 figures illustrate underlying principles, experimental apparatus, and data. In A Course in Quantum Mechanics readers will find detailed treatments of: Wave mechanics of de Broglie and Schrödinger, the Klein-Gordon equation and its non-relativistic approximation, free particle probability current, expectation values. Schrödinger equation in momentum space, spread in time of a free-particle wave packet, density matrix, Sturm-Liouville eigenvalue problem. WKB formula for bound states, example of WKB with a power law potential, normalization of WKB bound state wave functions, barrier penetration with WKB. Rotations and angular momentum, representations, Wigner d-functions, addition of angular momenta, the Wigner-Eckart theorem. Time-independent perturbation theory, Stark, Zeeman, Paschen-Back effects, time-dependent perturbation theory, Fermi’s Golden Rule. Atomic structure, helium, multiplet structure, Russell-Saunders coupling, spin-orbit interaction, Thomas-Fermi model, Hartree-Fock approximation. Scattering amplitude, Born approximation, allowing internal structure, inelastic scattering, optical theorem, validity criterion for the Born approximation, partial wave analysis, eikonal approximation, resonance. Semi-classical and quantum electromagnetism, Aharonov-Bohm effect, Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations, gauge invariance, quantization of the electromagnetic field, coherent states. Emission and absorption of radiation, dipole transitions, selection rules, Weisskopf-Wigner treatment of line breadth and level shift, Lamb shift. Relativistic quantum mechanics, Klein-Gordon equation, Dirac equation, two-component reduction, hole theory, Foldy-Wouthuysen transformation, Lorentz covariance, discrete symmetries, non-relativistic and relativistic Compton scattering.




Electrodynamics


Book Description

Practically all of modern physics deals with fields—functions of space (or spacetime) that give the value of a certain quantity, such as the temperature, in terms of its location within a prescribed volume. Electrodynamics is a comprehensive study of the field produced by (and interacting with) charged particles, which in practice means almost all matter. Fulvio Melia's Electrodynamics offers a concise, compact, yet complete treatment of this important branch of physics. Unlike most of the standard texts, Electrodynamics neither assumes familiarity with basic concepts nor ends before reaching advanced theoretical principles. Instead this book takes a continuous approach, leading the reader from fundamental physical principles through to a relativistic Lagrangian formalism that overlaps with the field theoretic techniques used in other branches of advanced physics. Avoiding unnecessary technical details and calculations, Electrodynamics will serve both as a useful supplemental text for graduate and advanced undergraduate students and as a helpful overview for physicists who specialize in other fields.




Darwinism, Democracy, and Race


Book Description

Darwinism, Democracy, and Race examines the development and defence of an argument that arose at the boundary between anthropology and evolutionary biology in twentieth-century America. In its fully articulated form, this argument simultaneously discredited scientific racism and defended free human agency in Darwinian terms. The volume is timely because it gives readers a key to assessing contemporary debates about the biology of race. By working across disciplinary lines, the book’s focal figures--the anthropologist Franz Boas, the cultural anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, and the physical anthropologist Sherwood Washburn--found increasingly persuasive ways of cutting between genetic determinist and social constructionist views of race by grounding Boas’s racially egalitarian, culturally relativistic, and democratically pluralistic ethic in a distinctive version of the genetic theory of natural selection. Collaborators in making and defending this argument included Ashley Montagu, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Lewontin. Darwinism, Democracy, and Race will appeal to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and academics interested in subjects including Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, Sociology of Race, History of Biology and Anthropology, and Rhetoric of Science.




Classical Electromagnetic Theory


Book Description

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, physicist and astronomer (1564-1642) This book is a second edition of “Classical Electromagnetic Theory” which derived from a set of lecture notes compiled over a number of years of teaching elect- magnetic theory to fourth year physics and electrical engineering students. These students had a previous exposure to electricity and magnetism, and the material from the ?rst four and a half chapters was presented as a review. I believe that the book makes a reasonable transition between the many excellent elementary books such as Gri?th’s Introduction to Electrodynamics and the obviously graduate level books such as Jackson’s Classical Electrodynamics or Landau and Lifshitz’ Elect- dynamics of Continuous Media. If the students have had a previous exposure to Electromagnetictheory, allthematerialcanbereasonablycoveredintwosemesters. Neophytes should probable spend a semester on the ?rst four or ?ve chapters as well as, depending on their mathematical background, the Appendices B to F. For a shorter or more elementary course, the material on spherical waves, waveguides, and waves in anisotropic media may be omitted without loss of continuity.




A Student's Guide to Numerical Methods


Book Description

The plain language style, worked examples and exercises in this book help students to understand the foundations of computational physics and engineering.