Reading:

  • Griffiths, Parts of Chapter 12 as described in the problems below. I’ve tried to indicate which equations I want you to understand. I’m hoping that helps you focus your reading.

Instead of the usual 8 points we look for, please do the following: (1) Provide a sketch of the solutions to each problem. Whatever you got done in class is fine with me. (2) Write a paragraph about how the journey of this class led to your ability to think about problems 3 and 4. You can write about the mental/emotional/meta-physical journey if you want, but I would definitely like you to write about your journey through the concepts of the class (for example, we weren’t able to talk about EM waves until we had really understood statics, which led us to time-changing fields, which led us to EM waves.)

  1. Griffiths 12.6 NYTimes claims astronomers find things traveling faster than the speed of light… You don’t actually need any fancy relativity to do this one…you just need to know that signals take time to travel. Read the chapter up until that problem. It’s mostly expository. Rather than taking notes, just jot down a few interesting takeaways.
  2. Griffiths 12.20 Practice with the invariant interval. You’re going to want to understand what the invariant interval (Eq 12.36), which means you need to understand the Einstein summation convention (Eq 12.33) and four-vectors (page 525) and you’re going to want to understand the Lorentz transformation (12.18) which means you need to read most of section 12.1.3 and 12.1.4 up until Problem 12.20.
  3. Griffiths 12.48 An electromagnetic wave observed from two different reference frames. You need equation 12.109 to transform the fields, and the reverse Lorentz transformations to transform the $(kx-\omega t)$.
    • Read section 12.3.1. Read the first two pages in 12.3.2 and the little bit on the third page just before Example 12.14. (You end up skipping the section on relativistic mechanics, but I’d rather have you concentrate on how the fields transform.)
  4. Griffiths 12.58
    • Read Section 12.3.3 with the goal of understanding Equation 12.119.
    • Read Section 12.3.4 with the goal of understanding Equation 12.127. (which is all of Maxwell’s equations in compact form)
    • Read Section 12.3.5 with the goal of understanding Equation 12.138. (which is all of Maxwell’s equations in even more compact form)