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meanfreepathI need to decide whether or not to go to Bryn Mawr tonight.
I'm supposed to derive the Clausius-Mossotti equation, relating the atomic polarizability of a nonpolar dielectric to the dielectric constant, for my 112 seminar presentation on Monday. There is a problem in Griffiths on this, and Carl suggested looking at Born and Wolf's Principles of Optics. Now, Cornell is supposed to have a copy of the latest edition, but it's lost. Cornell has several older editions, and it doesn't seem like there's much change between them, so it probably doesn't matter much. But... I do have an excuse to go to Bryn Mawr, and get that book out of Collier. Perhaps I'll go after dinner tonight. Or maybe I'll go tomorrow afternoon and get to dine in Erdman with Doublestar folk. There's also a BMC physics colloquium Monday night, and it appears that they serve dinner in Haffner before the talk. It's a Maryland neutrino guy talking, and given that the Swat physics colloquium series this fall has little to do with pure physics (all the talks advertised thus far are astrophysics or environmental science) I might want to go to this one. Especially if they serve a nice dinner beforehand. I could always catch the van after 112 seminar...
Anyway... while we're on the subject of old editions of books, I got the 1st edition of Purcell, for there is some experimental data in there, that's useful for my presentation, mentioned in a footnote in Griffiths.
What's really nifty is that while browsing around for the optics book and the old (1960's) edition of Purcell, I came across a French (introductory?) physics series. I say introductory because judging from the mathematical level of the book, it doesn't look much harder than Purcell. On the other hand, the series is supposed to be 8 volumes long. It's Phyisique generale et experimentale by P. Fleury and J. P. Mathieu. I got the volume "Electrostatique, Courants Continus, Magnetisme" (electrostatics, continuous? currents, and magnetism). What's interesting about these books is that, unlike modern American physics books that are pretty much all theory, there's a lot of practical, experimental stuff in them (which is probably why they're ridiculously long). There's, for instance, an entire chapter devoted to electrostatic machines (i.e. van de Graaf generators), the construction of a number of types of chemical batteries, and thermocouples.
Some of the notation and concepts are just weird, too. They talk about the cgs electrostatic system, and propose that the unit of charge be called, not the esu or the statcoulomb, but the franklin. And there's the way they call the curl "le rotationnel" (which does translate our "curl"). They write, for the curl of a vector field V not our "curl V" or del cross V, but "rot V" with a curly arrow above the "rot." Dot products they write with a period, so a.b instead of what we're used to seeing. The other weird notation is that, for the Laplacian, instead of del squared as we write they write what we'd call a capital delta. It's just weird... seeing Laplace's equation written as "delta V = 0" makes me think that the change in V is 0, which is of course not what Laplace's equation means.
And they go on to talk about weird things you do to the electric polarization of certain crystals by burning them, and other odd things. Other strange things... they call a bar magnet (or perhaps what they mean is what we call a magnetic dipole?) "un aimant", which as an adjective also means "loving". They also use what they describe as a fictitious concept of magnetic mass, from which they write a magnetic version of Coulomb's law.
I should stop reading this and looking for the strangenesses therein. I really ought to stick with Griffiths for now, as far as preparing for seminar goes.
I'm supposed to derive the Clausius-Mossotti equation, relating the atomic polarizability of a nonpolar dielectric to the dielectric constant, for my 112 seminar presentation on Monday. There is a problem in Griffiths on this, and Carl suggested looking at Born and Wolf's Principles of Optics. Now, Cornell is supposed to have a copy of the latest edition, but it's lost. Cornell has several older editions, and it doesn't seem like there's much change between them, so it probably doesn't matter much. But... I do have an excuse to go to Bryn Mawr, and get that book out of Collier. Perhaps I'll go after dinner tonight. Or maybe I'll go tomorrow afternoon and get to dine in Erdman with Doublestar folk. There's also a BMC physics colloquium Monday night, and it appears that they serve dinner in Haffner before the talk. It's a Maryland neutrino guy talking, and given that the Swat physics colloquium series this fall has little to do with pure physics (all the talks advertised thus far are astrophysics or environmental science) I might want to go to this one. Especially if they serve a nice dinner beforehand. I could always catch the van after 112 seminar...
Anyway... while we're on the subject of old editions of books, I got the 1st edition of Purcell, for there is some experimental data in there, that's useful for my presentation, mentioned in a footnote in Griffiths.
What's really nifty is that while browsing around for the optics book and the old (1960's) edition of Purcell, I came across a French (introductory?) physics series. I say introductory because judging from the mathematical level of the book, it doesn't look much harder than Purcell. On the other hand, the series is supposed to be 8 volumes long. It's Phyisique generale et experimentale by P. Fleury and J. P. Mathieu. I got the volume "Electrostatique, Courants Continus, Magnetisme" (electrostatics, continuous? currents, and magnetism). What's interesting about these books is that, unlike modern American physics books that are pretty much all theory, there's a lot of practical, experimental stuff in them (which is probably why they're ridiculously long). There's, for instance, an entire chapter devoted to electrostatic machines (i.e. van de Graaf generators), the construction of a number of types of chemical batteries, and thermocouples.
Some of the notation and concepts are just weird, too. They talk about the cgs electrostatic system, and propose that the unit of charge be called, not the esu or the statcoulomb, but the franklin. And there's the way they call the curl "le rotationnel" (which does translate our "curl"). They write, for the curl of a vector field V not our "curl V" or del cross V, but "rot V" with a curly arrow above the "rot." Dot products they write with a period, so a.b instead of what we're used to seeing. The other weird notation is that, for the Laplacian, instead of del squared as we write they write what we'd call a capital delta. It's just weird... seeing Laplace's equation written as "delta V = 0" makes me think that the change in V is 0, which is of course not what Laplace's equation means.
And they go on to talk about weird things you do to the electric polarization of certain crystals by burning them, and other odd things. Other strange things... they call a bar magnet (or perhaps what they mean is what we call a magnetic dipole?) "un aimant", which as an adjective also means "loving". They also use what they describe as a fictitious concept of magnetic mass, from which they write a magnetic version of Coulomb's law.
I should stop reading this and looking for the strangenesses therein. I really ought to stick with Griffiths for now, as far as preparing for seminar goes.
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Date: 2004-09-18 03:32 pm (UTC)