The Many Faces of Maxwell, Dirac and Einstein Equations: A Clifford Bundle Approach / Edition 1

by Waldyr A. Rodrigues, Edmundo C. Oliveira

Overview

Maxwell, Dirac and Einstein’s equations are certainly among the most imp- tant equations of XXth century Physics and it is our intention in this book to 1 investigate some of the many faces of these equations and their relationship and to discuss some foundational issues involving some of the theories where they appear. To do that, let us briefly recall some facts. Maxwell equations which date back to the XIXth century encodes all cl- sical electromagnetism, i. e. they describe the electromagnetic fields generated by charge distributions in arbitrary motion. Of course, when Maxwell f- mulated his theory the arena where physical phenomena were supposed to occur was a Newtonian spacetime, a structure containing a manifold which is 3 di?eomorphic to R×R , the first factor describing Newtonian absolute time 2 [25] and the second factor the Euclidean space of our immediate perception . In his original approach Maxwell presented his equations as a system of eight linear firstorderpartialdifferentialequations involvingthe components of the electricandmagneticfields[17]generatedbychargeandcurrentsdistributions 3 with prescribed motions in vacuum . It was only after Heaviside [12], Hertz and Gibbs that those equations were presented using vector calculus, which by the way, is the form they appear until today in elementary textbooks on Electrodynamics and Engineering Sciences. In the vector calculus formalism Maxwell equations are encoded in four equations involving the well known divergentandrotationaloperators.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783642090387
Publisher:	Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Publication date:	11/24/2010
Series:	Lecture Notes in Physics , #722
Edition description:	Softcover reprint of hardcover 1st ed. 2007
Pages:	445
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.04(d)

Table of Contents

Multiform and Extensor Calculus.- The Hidden Geometrical Nature of Spinors.- Some Differential Geometry.- Some Issues in Relativistic Spacetime Theories.- Clifford and Dirac-Hestenes Spinor Fields.- Lagrangian Formalism in Minkowski Spacetime.- Conservation Laws on Riemann-Cartan and Lorentzian Spacetimes.- The DHE on a RCST and the Meaning of Active Local Lorentz Invariance.- Gravitational Theory in Minkowski Spacetime.- On the Many Faces of Einstein’s Equations.- Maxwell, Dirac and Seiberg-Witten Equations.- Superparticles and Superfields.

Editorial Reviews

"The main intention of the present book is to familiarise the reader with the algebra and calculus within the Clifford bundle formalism … . The text is written in a very readable manner and is complemented with plenty of worked-out exercises which are in the style of extended examples. ... From my personal point of view, the authors elegantly succeed in their ambitions and, in my opinion, their book could also serve as a textbook for graduate students in physics or mathematics." (Alberto Molgado, Mathematical Reviews, 2008 k)

From the Publisher