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Comment by kjellsbells | Hacker News Reader

Re #2: Jackson was the standard text for undergrads like me doing a Mathematics degree. It was a late second year or early third (final) year text if I recall rightly. This was 1992, so I'm still amazed to read that its still a commonly used text.

Fwiw, other standard texts used in Durham (UK) back then were Spivak on Calculus, Goldstein on mechanics, and for the mathematical physics kids, landau and lifschitz on mechanics and electromagnetism, and (an absolute doorstop) Misner, Wheeler and Thorne on Gravitation (relativity).

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From the first preface (1962) of Jackson

> Typically, the undergrad program in electricity and magnetism involves two or perhaps three semesters beyond elementary physics.... As a general rule, a two-semester course in electromagnetic theory is given to beginning graduate students. It is for such a course that my book is designed.

So, your professors did you injustice by using an inappropriate book. Spivak, Goldstein and MWT are undergraduate books and appropriate. Landau and Lifschitz is great and accessible to smart undergraduates, but I don't see why you would use it for mathematical physics. Sure, Landau emphasized methods a lot, but there are better books for it.

As someone studying Physics (Bachelor) in Germany Jackson is what my electrodynamics professor recommended. My professor greatly shortened the chapter maxwell in matter and opted to give an intro into quantum electrodynamics instead.

At my uni it's a fourth semester course with theoretical mechanics (second semester) and quantum mechanics (third semester) preceeding it.

> So, your professors did you injustice by using an inappropriate book.

Not necessarily: undergraduate and pre-undergraduate education differs a lot between the UK and the US.

MTW ("the telephone book") is definitely not an undergrad textbook (although you might be able to cobble together an undergrad course out of bits and pieces of it). It is very heavy on intuition and visualization, though, which is why I like it (e.g. the "egg carton" visualization of differential forms).

From the preface of MTW:

> It supplies two tracks through the subject. The first track ... is suitable for a one-semester course at the junior or senior level or in graduate school.

As you say, it picks out bits and pieces that an undergrad can understand.

Today, there are better GR books, so use those.

There are certainly many better GR books (going back at least as far as Wald), but there's still nothing quite like the whimsy of MTW.

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