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

[arunma]

When I was taking E&M, we used Jackson the first semester, and got all of our problems from the textbook. The second semester, Jackson was still the text (to the extent that the professor outlined the course the same way), but the professor started writing his own problems instead of assigning them out of Jackson. His problems were just as hard as Jackson's, but now we didn't have the ability to look up solutions online. The only reason I survived was because being a high energy/astrophysics student, I had seen a lot of the EM radiation stuff before.

Seriously, are you sure you don't want to use Jackson? He's hated not because his textbook is bad, but because he represents E&M, which is the hardest class in all of graduate physics (at least I think it is). Your beef isn't with Jackson, it's with E&M. I feel your pain, but I don't think you can get out of this.

 

[Academic]

I guess Ill chime in with the dissenting opinion, I don't think suffering through Jackson is necessary. Its not necessary to do real, modern science nor is it necessary to learn the 'spirit' of physics. I did finish my E&M courses with Jackson and don't feel that it was really that helpful. I am not alone on this either, at my undergrad and grad institution there is a split among the faculty. One part wants to modernize the curriculum to try to keep physics relevant, the other wants to keep it more traditional by teaching traditional techniques.

I could quickly slide into a rant on the culture of physics and current course into irrelevance, but I will stop short of that (for now).

That said, choosing your grad school based off of Jackson doesn't seem reasonable at all. At worst it will be irrelevant and hard, at best it will be relevant and easy. In either case it shouldn't factor into your grad school choice.

 

[stevenb]

... I am not alone on this either, at my undergrad and grad institution there is a split among the faculty. One part wants to modernize the curriculum to try to keep physics relevant,

I don't understand how a rigorous foundation in EM theory could not be relevant to learning and doing physics. I'm not a physicist, so maybe I'm not qualified to have an opinion here, but I see the same attitude in my own field of electrical engineering, and I detest it. So many (more than half it seems) EEs think knowing EM theory and application is no longer relevant to being a good EE. Computer/electrical engineers now only take one course in EM, while straight electrical engineering programs still require 2 courses, but don't ask the typical student to solve more than a basic problem after graduation. Then, in grad school, there is no requirement to take any EM at all. To me, this makes no sense because a high percentage of real world electrical engineering problems are solvable with classical EM theory combined with mechanics (either Newton, Einstein or Quantum), with high accuracy. Granted, simpler theories (e.g. circuit theory) also work often, but not always. I know that the significance is less for modern physicists given the success of QFT, but if one can't do EM, what hope is there of tackling QFT?

Are we heading into a future where EEs and physicists don't even know more than the basics of EM? What an embarrassment that will be, in my opinion.

On the subject of Jackson, I don't know of any engineering programs from past days that used it, and perhaps this is why the 3rd edition switched to SI units which is used by EEs exclusively. However, I always felt this was an unfortunate miss since engineers can benefit from a physicist's approach to the subject, perhaps even more than a physicist. This is why I bought this book long ago and used it to learn from. Just look at problem 1.1 from the second edition. Now that is a question that teaches something significant. I could ask 100 EEs that question, and I doubt more than 2 would be able to answer it off the top of their head. I would have expected physicists to do much better, but if the above attitude is representative of physicists in general, then perhaps I should lower my expectations.

Something is very rotten in the state of Denmark when an average engineer has more appreciation of the beauty and practicality of a physics topic, than a significant split among a physics faculty.

 

[ZapperZ]

I guess Ill chime in with the dissenting opinion, I don't think suffering through Jackson is necessary. Its not necessary to do real, modern science nor is it necessary to learn the 'spirit' of physics. I did finish my E&M courses with Jackson and don't feel that it was really that helpful. I am not alone on this either, at my undergrad and grad institution there is a split among the faculty. One part wants to modernize the curriculum to try to keep physics relevant, the other wants to keep it more traditional by teaching traditional techniques.

I could quickly slide into a rant on the culture of physics and current course into irrelevance, but I will stop short of that (for now).

That said, choosing your grad school based off of Jackson doesn't seem reasonable at all. At worst it will be irrelevant and hard, at best it will be relevant and easy. In either case it shouldn't factor into your grad school choice.

When I took Jackson, the class consisted of students in physics AND electrical engineering! I don't know how one could claim that this has nothing to do with real, modern science.

AND, if you go into Accelerator Physics, it is ALL advanced classical E&M right out of Jackson. In fact, I've seen a senior physicist told a new Postdoc to ".. review Jackson inside out.. " when he first started.

Zz.

 

[eXorikos]

Not everyone goes into accelerator physics...

 

[Vanadium 50]

Not everyone goes into accelerator physics...

True, but the number of people who end up doing exactly what they studied in grad school is very, very small.

Most of the things I work on didn't even exist when I was in grad school.

 

[ZapperZ]

Not everyone goes into accelerator physics...

But that isn't my point! My point was to counter the argument that the book has nothing to do with "real" life situation! It does! The fact that electrical engineering students also take courses using such text is the clearest argument there is. The fact that accelerator physicists/engineers have to know stuff from Jackson (and also keep that text in their offices at work) is that proof-in-the-pudding.

Zz.

 

[mordechai9]

Having been through a through a number of textbooks, I can say without reservation Jackson is one of the best books I have studied. Some books are simply incomprehensible (leaving out details in the derivations, omitting crucial facts, speaking in confusing language, speaking unclearly). Some books I get the feeling are written by people who are probably great physicists, but awful theoreticians, or at least, awful expositors of theory. This isn't surprising considering that physics is a field involved with much 'intuition' and not everyone is expected to be great at dealing with the theory. On the other hand, the book by Jackson is so comprehensible, it's simply a masterpiece.

Other books are comprehensible, but they don't teach you how to solve the problems, by leaving out too many examples, or having things too abstract, or phrasing problems too far away from the material covered. Jackson actually teaches you how to solve the problems. In each chapter, he gives you everything you need to go through and really figure out how to do the work. There are many books which don't manage to meet this common ground. Furthermore, in Jackson many (or most) of the problems have the solutions written down as well, which can be indispensable for learning.

On the downside, Jackson is not easy to skim through. If you want to look up something, it takes like 1-2 hours IMO to carefully read through the relevant sections before you can feel satisfied. But the fact that you can sit down with the book, put time into it, and really learn an answer or a solution to a deep question... it's a masterwork, like I said.

In short, I think you may have a wrong impression about this.

 

[bob101]

In my undergraduate program, we were required to take take 5 semesters of e&m beyond first-year. In second-year, we had 2 semesters of e&m that used Purcell and Griffiths as texts. In third-year, we had a semester of applied e&m; wave guides, transmission lines, and other stuff. In fourth-year we covered much of Jackson in two semesters. We had regular assignments that consisted of Jackson questions.

where did you go to school?

 

[j93]

Having been through a through a number of textbooks, I can say without reservation Jackson is one of the best books I have studied. Some books are simply incomprehensible (leaving out details in the derivations, omitting crucial facts, speaking in confusing language, speaking unclearly). Some books I get the feeling are written by people who are probably great physicists, but awful theoreticians, or at least, awful expositors of theory. This isn't surprising considering that physics is a field involved with much 'intuition' and not everyone is expected to be great at dealing with the theory. On the other hand, the book by Jackson is so comprehensible, it's simply a masterpiece.

Other books are comprehensible, but they don't teach you how to solve the problems, by leaving out too many examples, or having things too abstract, or phrasing problems too far away from the material covered. Jackson actually teaches you how to solve the problems. In each chapter, he gives you everything you need to go through and really figure out how to do the work. There are many books which don't manage to meet this common ground. Furthermore, in Jackson many (or most) of the problems have the solutions written down as well, which can be indispensable for learning.

On the downside, Jackson is not easy to skim through. If you want to look up something, it takes like 1-2 hours IMO to carefully read through the relevant sections before you can feel satisfied. But the fact that you can sit down with the book, put time into it, and really learn an answer or a solution to a deep question... it's a masterwork, like I said.

In short, I think you may have a wrong impression about this.

I have to agree the sections in Jackson are actually readable unlike the Schwinger book or other E&M books. The problems are difficult but so can problems made by a professor, I don't mean to downplay but Jackson seems like it is an easier than it could be, you could be using an awful book and have to solve similarly difficult problem.

 

[j93]

where did you go to school?

I second your question.

 

[physics girl phd]

In Griffiths, did you try to find the solution to the Poisson equation for a disk of charge off-axis, i.e. not along the symmetry axis? Or look at the waveguide problem being tackled. Is that anything similar to what you did in Griffiths? What about using Green's function with the appropriate Dirichlet or Neuman boundary conditions?

Yes, you MAY think you're solving an electrostatic problem that looked familiar, but LOOK AGAIN! All the simplified situations that you are accustomed to in undergraduate E&M are no longer adopted! As stated earlier, these are now closer to what you have to deal with in real life!
Zz.

Huzzah! This is the kind of stuff I hint at to my EM class (the intro calc-based class for engineers -- aka not even "intermediate undergrad" EM level)... when they complain tremendously about their highly simplified scenarios. I outline how the problem COULD be worse, and they are immediately thankful that their problems (though they view them as hard) are of the simpler sort.

Let's keep in mind that getting a Ph.D in physics does, in part, mean that one is judged to be qualified to teach undergraduates (and often graduate students -- even those not in one's research area, if so called upon). If the OP wishes to avoid hard problems, let's hope the OP does not plan a career under the umbrella of academia (which would probably be very-difficult with the current job-market AND especially with a Ph.D. program perhaps "known" for "cutting a corner" like Jackson's EM). Doing the hard problems means one is more likely to see the symmetries, etc. that make setting up solvable (and "original") problems at the easier levels, well, easier.

PS. I was trained under the blue text, and it's fine... probably more so, since it uses SI for a large part (which is what one would use if teaching undergrads)... though in my grad school research my problem/analysis tended to use more CGS.

Also: I did NOT use online solutions... contrary to most I am an EM fan; in grad school, I used to have friends bring beer to my office (before the days of the dry-campus) and I'd help them work the problems in exchange.

 

[cristo]

I used to have friends bring beer to my office (before the days of the dry-campus)

This is the most worrying thing in your post. You have a dry campus? Ouch!

 

[twofish-quant]

One part wants to modernize the curriculum to try to keep physics relevant, the other wants to keep it more traditional by teaching traditional techniques.

I tend to be a traditionalist when it comes to physics education. One problem with trying to keep physics "relevant" is that people in academia often seriously guess wrong what skills are useful in industry.

At least in finance, a physics curriculum that focuses on being "relevant" ends up being much, much worse than one that focuses on "traditional irrelevancies." The problem is that if you teach people to solve the problems of 2006, they get totally lost in 2010. It's better to teach problem solving based on some basic hard math that doesn't change very much, and E&M is a pretty good place for that.

I could quickly slide into a rant on the culture of physics and current course into irrelevance, but I will stop short of that (for now).

I don't see the physics curriculum becoming irrelevant. There are lots of problems that I see with the physics curriculum but irrelevance isn't one of them.

I should point out that some of the interview questions that I got for my current position was pretty much taken out of Jackson. The logic is that if you are good at math, you can very quickly learn the finance that you need, but it doesn't work the other way.

 

[diggy]

How many grad programs in physics don't require Jackson's Electrodynamics? Which ones among them, in particular?

For what its worth, I'd recommend that you attend a grad school that does use Jackson. Instead of side stepping learning the material, take this time and prepare for it by first taking a full years math methods course (you can cover the material yourself the summer before grad school if you aren't able to fit it into your schedule now). With that and an undergrad background in something like Griffiths, Jackson will be much more palpable (much of what Jackson is, is the math methods).

10 years after Jackson I occasionally still find myself looking up problems. Recently I was working on a simulation and I was amazed how everything (almost everything) I needed was found in either very concise and informative sections or problems that I'd previously been assigned (luckily those hadn't been lost).

Don't skip out on the good stuff, you'll thank yourself later. Maybe an analogy to running a marathon is appropriate. Once you start running everyday, its not work, its what you look forward to.

 

[Prologue]

Jackson suits a certain type of student very well. If you have a good, careful, thorough professor, like to read a book thoroughly (~20hours a week) and then straight up copy the methods out of the book when you are solving the exercises, you will do fine. If you are a more 'intuitive' person that would like at least a glancing blow of an explanation on things, would like to sit down, read the problem, think about it and then answer it, good luck. Also, if you don't like to wade through ~20 hours of (excruciating) reading a week...you will just have to pray/hold out longer than the other half of the people in the class.

Also, there is a major difference between working 60hours a week on something that is interesting and working/reading Jackson for 30+hours, and using the other 30 hours on classes/colloquia/other courses. Jackson sucks the life out of you and pulls you away from your real interests. Of course, maybe the skills gained will be worth it in the end. I doubt it, but can't say. One thing that is puzzling to me in the asymmetry between the two classical topics, EandM and Mechanics. 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?

 

[plasmaqueen]

I have spent 8 months studying in Jackson's first 6 chapters. It is a masterpiece, I have to confess. It requires a strong background in mathematical physics techniques. The trick is to fully understand the theory, and to handle solutions by Separation of Variables really well. It boils down to finding coefficients by applying boundary conditions.
Yet I agree that spending 50+ hrs reading through Jackson makes students no longer interested. But, here's the challenge, who is strong enough to go on?

 

[cgk]

I tend to be a traditionalist when it comes to physics education. One problem with trying to keep physics "relevant" is that people in academia often seriously guess wrong what skills are useful in industry.

But doing a wild guess might still be better than blindly following 100 year old leads.
I'm not talking about E&M specifically, but there is lots of new information coming up, and space needs to be found for it. This can only be done by removing old topics from the curriculum and putting in new ones.

For example, there is a four volume series of books by Felix Klein and Arnold Sommerfeld... on the theory of the spinning top. They go through all possible and impossible variations and solution attempts at the spinning top problem. And I imagine 100 years ago, when this was still hot stuff, physicists argued about whether or not every physicist should have a profound understanding of solution strategies for such rigid body motions... Now I know very little about the spinning top, and I don't think I missed that.


I think that updating the curriculum can be a good idea. For example, in my opinion almost all statistical mechanics textbooks and many many-body theory textbooks are very bad because they set the focus completely wrong due to following "traditional" approaches and topics instead of teaching what is actually relevant. All that is taking away space from the more relevant problems. E.g., in modern E&M, these would certainly include *numerical* solutions to the PDEs. Where these even covered in Jackson to any significant degree? I can't remember.

 

[chill_factor]

But doing a wild guess might still be better than blindly following 100 year old leads.
I'm not talking about E&M specifically, but there is lots of new information coming up, and space needs to be found for it. This can only be done by removing old topics from the curriculum and putting in new ones.

For example, there is a four volume series of books by Felix Klein and Arnold Sommerfeld... on the theory of the spinning top. They go through all possible and impossible variations and solution attempts at the spinning top problem. And I imagine 100 years ago, when this was still hot stuff, physicists argued about whether or not every physicist should have a profound understanding of solution strategies for such rigid body motions... Now I know very little about the spinning top, and I don't think I missed that.I think that updating the curriculum can be a good idea. For example, in my opinion almost all statistical mechanics textbooks and many many-body theory textbooks are very bad because they set the focus completely wrong due to following "traditional" approaches and topics instead of teaching what is actually relevant. All that is taking away space from the more relevant problems. E.g., in modern E&M, these would certainly include *numerical* solutions to the PDEs. Where these even covered in Jackson to any significant degree? I can't remember.

i agree. For what it's worth, my M.S. Physics program right now doesn't use Jackson and if I go for a PhD, the use of Jackson is going to be a selection factor.

i truly believe that very few people need to know how to analytically solve EM problems at the jackson level. like you said, today its going to be numerical.

 

[plasmaqueen]

Are you sure guys that we do not need to understand EM problems at the Jackson Level, I am at MS program that Jackson is a MUST. You see, I am starting to think that my thinking level has risen after the attempt of solving those problems.

As for numerical, definitely , we need to study EM in a numerical approach, is there any book that does this today?

 

[plasmaqueen]

Yes I agree about statistical mechanics, which book did you use?

I am very interested in those volumes about the spinning top, we spent many hours discussing it in class, i even brought a top home! We were referring to Goldstein's book. I even have painted the spinning top...in charcoal ;)

 

[chill_factor]

Are you sure guys that we do not need to understand EM problems at the Jackson Level, I am at MS program that Jackson is a MUST. You see, I am starting to think that my thinking level has risen after the attempt of solving those problems.

As for numerical, definitely , we need to study EM in a numerical approach, is there any book that does this today?

at least at my school, we don't.

for plasma physics, EM is very very important, but how much EM do you need to know to do condensed matter physics? there's chemists and materials engineers doing the same research and they literally know ZERO EM.

 

[v0rtex]

I have nothing helpful to say, but I just don't get it. I want to go to a grad school that actually HAS Jackson's electrodynamics as a requirement. IMO this is has to be the most interesting part of classical physics (the most interesting physics subject IMO).

Up until last year, my school had a mandatory 3rd year undergrad course in electrodynamics that followed Jackson's text and I wish I could have taken it, because I really feel that I haven't learned enough with my first year courses, 2 EM courses + an EM optics course. Here's a link to the course material, including a solved quiz/exam, in case anyone cares:
http://webpages.ull.es/users/ajhernan/electrodinamica.htm

 

[twofish-quant]

i truly believe that very few people need to know how to analytically solve EM problems at the jackson level. like you said, today its going to be numerical.

But I don't see how you can come up with decent numerical results without having some analytic grasp on the problem, and most numerical computation involves a large amount of analytical manipulation to get the problem in a form that you can do numerical stuff on it.

 

[twofish-quant]

This can only be done by removing old topics from the curriculum and putting in new ones.

What happens in research is that the new stuff you figure out, and you can figure it out by seeing how stuff was figured out before.

They go through all possible and impossible variations and solution attempts at the spinning top problem. And I imagine 100 years ago, when this was still hot stuff, physicists argued about whether or not every physicist should have a profound understanding of solution strategies for such rigid body motions... Now I know very little about the spinning top, and I don't think I missed that.

What I've seen in industry is that you'd be asked to develop an extremely deep knowledge on an obscure topic, and the goal of graduate research as I see it is to give you the skills so that you can develop this sort of deep knowledge very quickly.

E.g., in modern E&M, these would certainly include *numerical* solutions to the PDEs. Where these even covered in Jackson to any significant degree? I can't remember.

If you know Jackson you can spend two weeks reading numerical recipes and code up something that more or less works for that class of problems.

I agree that there is always too much to teach, but my philosophy is that if by knowing X, you can figure out Y quickly, then there is no real point in spending too much time on Y. No you don't know finite element methods, but I think that it is the case that if you know Jackson really well, you can figure out FEM quickly, but the reverse is not true.

 

[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.