sci.physics.electromag

"Timo A. Nieminen" wrote
news: @ ...
> On Tue, 4 Sep 2007, Szczepan Bialek wrote:
>
>> "Timo A. Nieminen" wrote:
>>> On Sun, 2 Sep 2007, maxwell wrote:
>>>
>>>>> Isn't this an elegant bit of mathematics that can be taught to
>>>>> physics undergraduates.
>>>
>>> ???
>>
>> It has sense. Math is tought mainly together with physics. It is
>> impossible
>> to place the all into a textbook. So such bits have prefererences.
>> In math teaching are homeworks. For them are assumption and data. If they
>> were the solid body (as eather) and the MM when SR was an excelent job.
>> The
>> Authors were wery young. Young people are fluent in math.
>
> From the context, I did not know what "this" might be. If "this" is SR,
> then, sure, it can be taught to physics undergrads, and usually is.
>
> Often tacked onto the end of an introductory course, or as a whole or part
> of a second-year course. I think this is wrong - it would be nice to
> integrate it into classical mechanics in an introductory course, even if
> in a largely qualitative/conceptual way - that way, students won't feel
> they've been taught "wrong" stuff in the first few classical mechanics
> weeks of the course. A lot of relativity course modules pretty much say
> "all that stuff is wrong", which is just wrong. All of kinematics in a
> single reference frame still holds; it's just definitions of displacement,
> velocity, and acceleration and how to use them. Newton's laws, as written
> by Newton still hold; it's only F=ma you need to worry about, and the
> definition of momentum. Introduce the Galilei transformations as a useful
> approximation, rather than as truth. Useful to do light, including waves
> and photons, first, so avoid the traditional order of topics.
>
> If "this" is general continuum mechanics, then it's an advanced course.
> Although the general picture should be introduced at the beginning of,
> say, a course in fluid dynamics, and the elasticity-free case dominating
> the course clearly described as a simplification. Likewise for
> elastodynamics (not that I've seen a course in elastodynamics offered to
> physics undergrads).
>
> I like the idea of unifying continuum mechanics and electrodynamics into a
> single series of courses, perhaps 2 or 3. When the mathematical methods
> are dominated by the Laplace and Helmholtz equations, it makes sense to
> treat them together. Do fluids first, and you can even have nice physical
> demonstrations of what div and curl mean.

I hope that that beautiful and not easy math will be over in the near
future. Computer simulations and so on have bigger practical possibilities.
S*
>