ideas on how to understand this

Feb 10, 2012 32 Replies

Very hard work.

It took me 20 hrs/week of study to earn an A in E&M. I had to review completely all the math before hand, mostly the relevant vector calc. which was nicely covered in the text.

My favorite part was the transmission line chapters, which fortunately in the course I took, was heavily emphasized. I learned a great deal. Doing all the homework, and not just to get the answers, but exploring tangential questions which arise, was also essential in driving it home.

I wish the course had the time to get deeper into the propagation of waves through various media & boundaries, since that topic is basically the physics of optics, which is also heavily involved in my work with lasers.

If I had had to take this course along with several others in a full-time curriculum, I may have not been able to study it to the depth that I did. Rather, I took it as a one-off paid by my employer.

Of course, I forget most of it anyway, but the course together with considerable time scoping at the bench with fast logic gates driving coax cables did give me a decent understanding of signal propagation enough to fix most cabling problems caused by clueless scientists, and to design decent PCBs and cable drivers.

I could pick up the more rigorous stuff like bounce diagrams and Smith Charts in a few hours of review if I actually needed to do these things again.

E&M is extremely valuable subject to master at the introductory level at least once, so that the insights into proper physics can guide your reasoning throughout the rest of your career--assuming you do some sort of electrical engineering.

Good day!

_____________________ Mr.CRC crobcBOGUS@REMOVETHISsbcglobal.net SuSE 10.3 Linux 2.6.22.17

Actually, all I was trying to say that if you find E&M hard and unrewarding, it's not time to either slit your wrists or change your major to business management -- just that you should grit your teeth and get through the class with a passing grade, then don't take any jobs that involve optics, lasers, or microwaves.

(I don't speak from direct experience, by the way. I loved E&M, much to the disgust of most of my classmates. I wasn't a super student academically -- but I coached the A students through the mathematically intense classes. It was only after I graduated and got a job that I realized that not everyone has to be a whiz at the hard math -- as long as the group is seeded with people who are, or who can get the job done without it).

My liberal friends think I'm a conservative kook. My conservative friends think I'm a liberal kook. Why am I not happy that they have found common ground? Tim Wescott, Communications, Control, Circuits & Software http://www.wescottdesign.com

You sound like the roommate who got me thru calculus 101...by the skin of my teeth.

Sonnova gun! You couldn't make a "predictor" ?:-) ...Jim Thompson

| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 | I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.

I was trying to use the usual op amp all-pass network, i.e. +1 at low frequency, -1 at high frequency, only using an inductor instead of a capacitor. I blew a sign in the math--for that circuit the phase shift is opposite, but the gain is -1 at low frequency and +1 at high frequency, so the phase slope is the same as in the capacitor case.

(I'd just got my bachelor's degree in astronomy, and hadn't connected the Kramers-Kronig relations to circuits yet. Fortunately I learned fast.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 845-480-2058 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net

Given enough heresy, virtually all of the math in electromagnetic fields can be eliminated entirely.

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Many thanks, Don Lancaster voice phone: (928)428-4073 Synergetics 3860 West First Street Box 809 Thatcher, AZ 85552 rss: http://www.tinaja.com/whtnu.xml email: don@tinaja.com Please visit my GURU's LAIR web site at http://www.tinaja.com

Number crunching isn't heresy, it's the default SPICE jockey approach. It isn't a substitute for analysis, and it isn't new. In fact, we did almost this exact thing in my undergraduate physics lab course in about

1979, using one of the original Data General Novas. It's sort of cute doing it in PostScript, but Matlab or Octave would do it faster and give you similar-looking graphs.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 845-480-2058 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net

Best method is to learn enough to pass the test, then spend the rest of your life learning it for real.

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I completely agree with every word you wrote.

Yep. If I ever stop _learning_ new tricks, it'll be because I'm dead

...Jim Thompson

| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 | I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.

AKA: One step beyond 'Slomanized'. :(

You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense.

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Understood, most of my class mates hated E&M too. I petioned to take it early, (There was a 'good' prof. teaching it and a 'blow hard' the next year.)

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I'm very far from a math whiz, but I love thinking in three dimensions, and there's a lot of that in E&M.

George H.

ttdesign.com- Hide quoted text -

one: (928)428-4073

Thanks Don, I find the math is important, not to solve some complicated boundary value problem. But as a way to think about the world. The are zillions of examples of the same math solving different problems.

Most of the time my 'math' is just guesstimating some area, and a length, with some time constant involved.

George H.

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