Department of Physics

Physics 332: Electricity & Magnetism

Physics is the fundamental study of nature’s behavior – the players, motions, and interactions. Electromagnetism is one of the four fundamental interactions.  Along with Gravitation, it’s responsible for almost all every-day experiences as well as a broad spectrum of experimental observations.   Perhaps all four fundamental interactions merit an in-depth study, but Electromagnetism distinguishes itself as the most accessible.  Even so, the beauty and power (and, alas, frustration) of the mathematics brought to bear will be stunning.  This course is challenging on both mathematical and conceptual fronts – you will employ new mathematical tools and you will be asked to envision not the behavior of a single particle or wave, but that of a whole field. While this course may feel very specialized, the mathematical and conceptual tools and abilities that you will develop are actually much broader.

Goals

It goes without saying that you’ll deepen your understanding of electricity and magnetism and the appropriate techniques in this course.  More generally, through this course you should continue to develop your rigorous problem-solving skills – conceptual, analytical, and computational.  As they help you to solve complex problems, you’ll also hone your skills of communication as in clearly presenting your work.  Thus, of the five major goals that guide our physics curriculum, developing experimental skills is the only one not served by this course.

• Course Schedule (readings, notes, & homeworks)
• Policies and Expectations
• Computational tools and tutorials (thanks to Dr. DeWeerd for pulling these together)

Much of the content on this site is in PDF format. If your computer does not already have it, you will need to download Adobe Acrobat Reader (free software) to view that content.

Please let me know if you discover any problems or have any difficulty with the class web pages.