The World War II has completely changed the higher electrical engineering education in many countries such as the United States, Western Europe, Japan and the Soviet Union. Those electrical engineering educators in the United States who participated in the war found that the electrical technologies including radar, microwave, pulse technology, control system and navigation system that had achieved rapid development in the war were invented not by electrical engineers, but mainly by scientists who temporarily changed from physicists to engineers. Using the basic knowledge mastered by electrical engineers could not understand these new concepts, let alone develop these new technologies. After World War II, many pre-war courses of electrical engineering were replaced by basic theoretical courses such as physics and mathematics. In this context, the class hour and content of electromagnetic field course have been increased.
From 1952 to 1961, the textbook of the Soviet Union is widely used in the electrical engineering majors of Chinese universities. In 1961, two textbooks on electromagnetic fields written by the Chinese were published successively. After 1979, electrical engineering majors in Chinese universities have generally set up a separate course on electromagnetic field. Today, the course of electromagnetic field has become a compulsory technical basic course for undergraduate majors in electrical engineering and electronic information in China.
In the research and teaching of electromagnetic field theory, many difficult problems are often encountered. Among them, some are still unknown in electromagnetic field theory, some were generated when they were translated into Chinese, and some are caused by different understanding of electromagnetic field course. In order to solve these problems, the author based on electromagnetic field theory and historical data, after research, some problems have been solved, while others have not been answered yet. This article describes the opinions on 11 difficult problems, and the conclusions are as follows: James Clerk Maxwell’s masterwork A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism can be translated into Chinese as《电学与磁学专论》; The English term vector should be translated into Chinese 矢量; The 22nd Greek letter χ, which generally represents the electric polarizability and magnetic susceptibility, can be pronounced as Kai in Chinese Pinyin; The electric current does not need to be defined in teaching materials when International System of Units (SI) is adopted; The electromotive force symbol E and ε. are the script of the capital Latin letter E; From Faraday’s law, it can be directly proved that the divergence of the magnetic flux density in the time-varying electromagnetic field is zero; Poynting’s theorem cannot be derived from the law of conservation of energy; In the time-varying electromagnetic field, eddy current loss, electric field loss, magnetic hysteresis loss and residual losses in a ferromagnetic material can be directly added; When used to describe the propagation characteristics of transverse wave, the English term polarization should be translated into Chinese 偏振; Superconductor are not perfect conductor; Special relativity should be included in electromagnetic field textbooks.
雷银照. 电磁场理论及其教学中的11个问题[J]. 电工技术学报, 2023, 38(11): 3084-3093.
Lei Yinzhao. Eleven Problems in Electromagnetic Field Theory and Its Teaching. Transactions of China Electrotechnical Society, 2023, 38(11): 3084-3093.
2023, Vol. 38 
