This chapter discusses international law in context: how it relates to its political environment as well as to ethical concerns, and how the ethics of individual agents may be of relevance

What is a “wave”? I don’t think I can give you an entirely satisfactory answer – the concept is intrinsically somewhat vague – but here’s a start: A wave is a disturbance of a continuous medium that propagates with a fixed shape at constant velocity. Immediately I must add qualifiers: in the presence of absorption, the wave will diminish in size as it moves; if the medium is dispersive, different frequencies travel at different speeds; in two or three dimensions, as the wave spreads out, its amplitude will decrease; and of course standing waves don’t propagate at all. But these are refinements; let’s start with the simple case: fixed shape, constant speed, one dimension (Fig. 9.1).

This chapter discusses the basics of the law of treaties: what they are, how they are concluded, what efefcts they generate, and how they are to be terminated. It is built around the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties

If you walk 4 miles due north and then 3 miles due east (Fig. 1.1), you will have gone a total of 7 miles, but you’re not 7 miles from where you set out – only 5. We need an arithmetic to describe quantities like this, which evidently do not add in the ordinary way. The reason they don’t, of course, is that displacements (straight line segments going from one point to another) have direction as well as magnitude (length), and it is essential to take both into account when you combine them.

In this chapter, we shall study electric fields in matter. Matter, of course, comes in many varieties – solids, liquids, gases, metals, woods, glasses – and these substances do not all respond in the same way to electrostatic fields. Nevertheless, most everyday objects belong (at least, in good approximation) to one of two large classes: conductors and insulators (or dielectrics).

When charges accelerate, their fields can transport energy irreversibly out to infinity – a process we call radiation.1 Let us assume the source is localized2 near the origin; we would like to calculate the energy it radiates at time $t_0$. Imagine a gigantic sphere, out at radius $r$ (Fig. 11.1).

This chapter discusses how international alw is made, and how it can be iendtified

In this chapter we seek the general solution to Maxwell’s equations. Given the sources $\rho (\mathbf{r},t)$ and $\mathbf{J}(\mathbf{r},t)$, what are the fields $\mathbf{E}(\mathbf{r},t)$ and $\mathbf{B}(\mathbf{r},t)$? In the static case, Coulomb’s law and the Biot–Savart law provide the answer.

This chapter discusses the position (and especially protection) of the individual in international law, whether through human rights law, refugee law, the right to self-determination, or other means

This chapter outlines the various roles that the media can play in shaping foreign policy and discusses the limits and possibilities of public opinion as an influence on the actions of policymakers.