PHY753 Lecture 1

Notes by Thomas Curtright, 18 January 2022

The course page is here ...

http://www.physics.miami.edu/~curtright/2022PHY753.html

with various recommendations about the literature.

So far as theory goes, the course is mostly about "MEs":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_equations

This semester we will be concerned mainly about time dependent situations.

Given suitably localized microscopic current and charge densities, even those with dependence on time, the solutions of MEs can always be expressed as integrals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefimenko's_equations

Let's discuss how those integral expressions follow from solving MEs.

Here are my notes on MEs and the causal Green function.

It is remarkable that MEs are valid in any inertial reference frame --- the basis of special relativity, of course.  We will say much about this later this semester.

However, it is curious at least to me, that prior to the development of special relativity, or even afterwards, had astrophysicists made the requisite observations, they might have concluded that "superluminal motion" was actually possible.  But this would have only been an illusion based on misinterpretation of the data, as pointed out in 1966 by Martin Rees.