Electricity and Magnetism: Electrostatics
Learn how charges interact with each other and create electric fields and electric potential landscapes. This introductory Electromagnetism physics course requires the use of calculus.
Course Information
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About this Course
Electricity and Magnetism dominate much of the world around us – from the most fundamental processes in nature to cutting edge electronic devices. Electric and Magnet fields arise from charged particles. Charged particles also feel forces in electric and magnetic fields. Maxwell’s equations, in addition to describing this behavior, also describe electromagnetic radiation.
In this course, we focus on Electrostatics. We examine the forces between charges, electric fields, and electric potential, looking at different ways of calculating each. We also look at dipoles and the difference between conductors and insulators. The course ends by explaining capacitors and dielectrics.
This is the first course in a series of courses based on an MIT course: 8.02, Electricity and Magnetism, a required introductory physics class for all MIT undergraduates.
- 8.02.1x: Electricity and Magnetism: Electrostatics
- 8.02.2x: Electricity and magnetism: Magnetic Fields and Forces
- 8.02.3x: Electricity and Magnetism: Maxwell’s Equations
What you'll learn
- Electric Fields
- Dipoles
- Gauss’s Law
- Electric Potential
- Conductors, Insulators, and Capacitors
Prerequisites
- Concepts from Classical Mechanics (at the level of 8.01x Mechanics Series).
- Multivariable Calculus
Meet your instructors
Krishna Rajagopal
William A. M. Burden Professor of Physics
After growing up in Toronto, Professor Rajagopal did his undergraduate work at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. He obtained his doctorate at Princeton University in 1993 and spent three years at Harvard as a Junior Fellow. He then spent one year at Caltech before coming to MIT in 1997. He became the Associate Head of the Department of Physics in 2009, served as the Chair of the MIT faculty from 2015 to 2017 and as MIT’s Dean for Digital Learning from 2017 to 2021.
Professor Rajagopal has also described the properties of the superfluid, color superconducting, quark matter that may lie at the centers of neutron stars, providing a clear understanding of the properties of matter at extraordinarily high densities. His work shows that cold quark matter at the highest densities is the QCD analogue of a superconductor but that if you could look at it using ordinary light it would look like a transparent insulator.
