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Electrodynamics involves the study of electric charges and their interaction with magnetic and electric fields. This advanced undergraduate text presupposes some knowledge of electricity and magnetism, making substantial use of vector analysis. The authors define their goal as "a serious attempt to develop electrodynamics on a postulational basis and to define each concept in the most general way." 1960 edition.
Physics and the Human Body is about how we found out how our bodies and the world about us work. It is the common history of the discovery of the laws of physics and the exploration of human body over more than two millennia. Theories about what nature is, what we are and how our bodies function, have concerned natural philosophers and physicians since the time of Hippocrates and Empedocles. The purpose of this book is to give a coherent history of relevant theories and discoveries to show how physics and human biology are linked. Since the Renaissance natural philosophers and physicians have collaborated and influenced one another; Galileo and Santorini, Borelli and Malpighi, Isaac Newton and John Locke, Marie Curie and Claudius Regaud. Many theories and discoveries have been made by those who were both natural philosophers and physicians: Empedocles, Ibn Sina, Gilbert, Stensen, Mayow, Stahl, Black, Poiseuille, Young, Purkinje, von Helmholtz, Berzelius and Koch. Two important themes recur in these stories of discovery. The first is the close relationship between the physical and medical sciences. The second is the inspirational nature of discovery and the power of inventive genius to formulate surprising theories of great explanatory and predictive power; theories that have revolutionized our ways of looking at the natural world and ourselves. These discoveries emphasize that the laws of physics govern the living human body as they do inanimate matter. Physics goes on inside us as well as outside. Yet for many people this unsurprising reality has been hard to accept because physics and medical biology have, in the past, been presented as entirely separate disciplines. The physics of quantum electrodynamics helped to understand the role of DNA in human genetics. The Human Genome Project completed in 2003 resulted from the discoveries of physicists as well as medical scientists and promises further insights into our nature. Quantum and radiation physics have provided new technologies such as ultrasound, nuclear medicine and computed tomography for non-surgical exploration of the living body.
Let us first state exactly what this book is and what it is not. It is a compendium of equations for the physicist and the engineer working with electrostatics, magne tostatics, electric currents, electromagnetic fields, heat flow, gravitation, diffusion, optics, or acoustics. It tabulates the properties of 40 coordinate systems, states the Laplace and Helmholtz equations in each coordinate system, and gives the separation equations and their solutions. But it is not a textbook and it does not cover relativistic and quantum phenomena. The history of classical physics may be regarded as an interplay between two ideas, the concept of action-at-a-distance and the concept of a field. Newton's equation of universal gravitation, for instance, implies action-at-a-distance. The same form of equation was employed by COULOMB to express the force between charged particles. AMPERE and GAUSS extended this idea to the phenomenological action between currents. In 1867, LUDVIG LORENZ formulated electrodynamics as retarded action-at-a-distance. At almost the same time, MAXWELL presented the alternative formulation in terms of fields. In most cases, the field approach has shown itself to be the more powerful.
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