Freaking Jackson

No, not the child molesting pop singer that everyone likes to ridicule. (It'd be great to see him behind bars IMHO -- seducing young boys is NOT cool, even when you pay millions of dollars for it later to keep the family quiet.)

My bane of the past four days has been J. D. Jackson, author of Classical Electrodynamics, the physics/engineering student's dreaded book. Not only did it cost a lot (although not nearly as much as the book Tokamaks for my magnetic plasma confinement class), but it's more of a reference for people who already know the material, as opposed to being a book read for actually picking it up in the first place. Now, the book has a very lofty reputation amongst physicists and engineers, because practically everyone these days holding professorships took "the Jackson" course, suffered greatly, and, more often than not, is happy to see other students go though the same pain. Combine that with the fact that the book is outdated, inconsistent in notation with today's standards (and even itself at times), and that my class is starting at the end of the book instead of the beginning: not fun times for me.

I have begun to see why everyone dreads Jackson; this weeks assignment (4 problems) took me a little over 22 hours to do, with the assistance of available online solutions proffered by good-hearted souls who've been there before. (As my advisor quipped, "those problems are good for your health," followed by general shock when he learned about starting at the end of the book. "F------ physicists!" was his next exclamation. :))

If this is what graduate school for physicists is like, then boy I'm glad I'm in plasma physics -- in the good old department of Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics. (Somehow, classes about building giant magnetic traps and confining stuff that's 100,000 times hotter than the temperature of tungsten [the best material at withstanding heat as a solid] is more interesting than doing abstract algebra and tensor manipulations. :))

BTW the Pegasus Group got together for a group photo! I've got one of them hosted here for those of you who haven't seen the scale of the machine I work on!