From Electrostatics to Optics: A Concise Electrodynamics Course (Theoretical and Mathematical Physics)

After a historical introduction and mathematical preliminaries the book turns to electrostatics in vacuum, whereby Maxwells equations are not postulated as axioms, but deduced from electrostatics plus Lorentz invariance. These general ideas are then illustrated by many applications, radiation phenomena in particular. Chapter 4 is devoted to the completely different subject of phenomenological electrodynamics of matter, with the equations derived by spatial averaging, assuming a classical model for the atomic structure of matter. The chapter on optics is not treated as an independent field, but rather an application of Chapter 4, where significant themes such as wave optics, light scattering, geometrical optics, diffraction theory, and the laser are discussed. Finally, an epilogue relates the classical theory to modern quantum electrodynamics.