Visual tour of classical electromagnetism

Re:Visual tour of classical electromagnetism by tremendulo on Thursday January 18, 2018 @05:50AM (#16176122)

One early misconception I had about EM was that there were discrete 'lines' of force. I guess this either arose from iron filings experiments or from the way the diagrams of fields are (perhaps unavoidably) drawn. But now I know the fields are continuous.

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Re:Visual tour of classical electromagnetism by agumonkey on Thursday January 18, 2018 @07:50AM (#16176675)

I'm still confused by the notion of line/field/flux density. That said, I found a few books to read about that.

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Re:Visual tour of classical electromagnetism by Koshkin on Thursday January 18, 2018 @10:58AM (#16178055)

This may be a good explanation: https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/matnat/fys/FYS4160/v08/unde...

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Re:Visual tour of classical electromagnetism by alphydan on Thursday January 18, 2018 @07:49AM (#16176671)

> But now I know the fields are continuous.

Wait 'til you hear of quantum electrodynamics ;)

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Re:Visual tour of classical electromagnetism by Koshkin on Thursday January 18, 2018 @09:57AM (#16177485)

To be fair, this is about classical electromagnetism.

What is annoying though, it is the pervasive practice according to which some authors completely ignore H ("intensity of the magnetic field") while others pretend to know nothing (and nor should their students) about B ("magnetic induction").

Somewhat less annoyingly, the teachers of electromagnetism rarely introduce the students to the formulation in terms of differential forms, which many consider a better, more intuitive way of doing electrodynamics compared to vector analysis (which student still should learn, of course).

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