I want to learn about electricity and electromagnetism (resistance, voltage, current, induction etc.) because I'm interested in building a tesla coil. I consider myself very intelligent, and taught myself organic chemistry (the whole theory, reactions and basics, nothing too advanced), but don't know much about physics. I've had high school chemistry and a half a year of physics, but didn't get much past newtonian forces.... Any help/explanation from the start sites??
l33t-haX0r
2008-09-05, 14:29
Hyperphysics is pretty decent:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/HFrame.html
This guy has some good notes aswell:
http://www.porlhews.co.uk/
I highly recommend 'Feynmans Lectures on Physics Vol. 2' and 'Introduction to Electrodynamics' by David Griffiths. Feynmans book touches on electrostatics but you're better off getting the basics from somewhere else like Hyperphysics or wikipedia. To understand electrodynamics you're going to need to know abit of vector calculus. Both books give a quick introduction and this site has a lot of good explanations and examples: http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/
I recommend you learn in order (taken from the courses I've done):
Electric charge and electrostatics
Electric fields
Gauss' Law
Electric potential
Capacitance
Current and resistance
Circuits
Magnetic fields
Magnetic fields due to currents
Induction and Inductance
Electromagnetic oscillations and A.C
Electrodynamics
Maxwell's equations
Electromagnetic waves
It looks like alot of stuff to cover but the basics are easy. It's worth it though, Maxwell's theory is really amazing but hard to get your head around. It leads on to Einsteins relativity.