Old and new

A week or so ago, I paid a visit to the splendid Sanctuary Bookshop at the bottom of Broad Street of Lyme Regis. A shop which must have been very quick off the mark with the Internet, given that its website is to be found at reference 4. A bookshop that appears to double as a bed & breakfast, offering a Japanese style breakfast.

Given that first I was pondering about fields and waves at the time and that second I don't like to leave a secondhand bookshop in which I have spent time without buying something, I was glad to light upon the book snapped right. A snip at £2. It turned out that the chap who ran the bookshop had been a physicist in his day, in various parts of London University and that this was the standard electrical text when he was a student, very roughly the same time that I was a student. Despite its age, I thought it might be of interest to me, very much a beginner in these matters - which indeed it turned out to be.

With Bleaney and Bleaney turning out to be a husband and wife team from the University of Oxford, with the husband being (or perhaps having been) Dr Lee’s Professor of Experimental Philosophy there and with this standard text including, inter alia, a helpful appendix about vectors, elucidating for me the mysteries of things like grad and curl. But a rather dense text, after the fashion of its time.

Eventually, I turned up reference 1, an open university physics resource for both students and teachers. A rather less dense text, designed for teach yourself at home. I thought it was very good.

And in the margins of all this, I turned up reference 2, the slides for a series of lectures given by one Sir Michael Brady, again at Oxford, on partial differential equations and waves - and in terms of accessibility, somewhere between references 1 and 3.

So what with the old and the new, probably quite enough on fields and waves to keep me going for a long time. A complete change from Maigret!

PS: for the avoidance of doubt, the original owner of the book (Mr. Fisher) was not the owner of the bookshop (Mr. Speer).

Reference 1: http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/pplato2/index.html.

Reference 2: http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~jmb/lectures/pdelecture1.pdf.

Reference 3: Electricity and Magnetism: second edition – Bleaney & Bleaney – 1965.

Reference 4: http://www.lyme-regis.com/.