Well, I am a bit behind in this project. It's now April, and I am posting about February's book of the month.
I have had my copy of Bleaney & Bleaney's Electricity and Magnetism (vol 1) since the early 90s when I was an undergraduate student at Oxford. It was one of the small number of physics books I got a copy of from the reading lists, what with textbooks being expensive and me not having much money at the time. It's just possible I used one of the book grants available from Balliol College to buy it - I can't remember now.
Electricity and Magnetism was one of those core subjects in an undergraduate physics degree which I struggled a bit with at first, and found just plain difficult, then got much more comfortable and confident with, and more than any other book, I think I have this one to thank.
Before heading off to Uni, my college sent a reading list of textbooks that would be useful in the first year. The electromagnetism book recommend was one of Lorrain and Corson's books on the topic. I managed to find a very slighty reduced copy of their "Electromagnetism: Principles and Applications" from my nearest bookshop in a university city (Heffers in Cambridge) but was a bit disappointed to realise once at university that it was a cut-down version of Lorrain, Corson and Lorrain's Electromagnetic Fields and Waves and did not cover what was needed.
Anyway, Bleaney and Bleaney... I found it a useful book as an undergraduate. I think I devoured several small sections which were the topics picked out for inclusion in our course, and found several understandable explanations of things like refraction at a dielectric boundary from a microscopic point of view.
My general experience with physics as an undergraduate is that the ideas made some qualitative sense at first, then I was able to push through some derivations which indivudually made some sense, but without forming a coherent picture, and finally, only when the links had been made between various different areas, and I'd practiced enough, did a kind of more holistic understand develop in me. Then later, as I progressed through my career, did I realise again that I knew and understood a lot less that I thought.
I remember - probably as a graduate student when I spent a lot of time in the Clarendon Laboratory - seeing the picture of Brebis Bleaney whenever I walked past the corridor with the photos of staff. He would have been emeritus, at 80 years old, by the time I started my PhD, and I'm not sure I ever saw him in person. The first author of the book, Betty, Brebis's wife, I'm not sure was accorded a picture in the Lab, and presumably did not hold a full academic position in the boys' club. The frontispiece of the book lists her as "Formerly Fellow of St Hugh's College, Oxford" so possibly she only had a college position and at most a visitor's right to align herself with the laboratory without pay – a similar arrangement to my own PhD supervisor.
Brebis Bleaney has a Wikipedia page, and a longer article about him in the Royal Society's obituary journal.
Part of the delay in writing up about this book is that the book-per-month project is supposed to be more than general reminiscences of each book, but that I would try to get at least a bit of work out of each one. In this case, I got as far as doing the first excerice which is given as follows:
I was able to do the exercise without much problem, but typesetting the answer inside Blogger is not so easy, and this has been the main sticking point to me posting about the book. I could upload pictures of my scruffy derivation, but for now, I might just leave it as an exercise for the reader. Enjoy!
