For my part, I don’t have that association. I associate italics with “someone trying to make it easy for me to parse what they’re saying”. I tend to associate it with blog posts, honestly. I wish papers and textbooks would use it more.
Here’s a pretty typical few sentences from Introduction to Electrodynamics, a textbook by David Griffiths:
The electric field diverges away from a (positive) charge; the magnetic field line curls around a current (Fig. 5.44). Electric field lines originate on positive charges and terminate on negative ones; magnetic field lines do not begin or end anywhere—to do so would require a nonzero divergence. They typically form closed loops or extend out to infinity.17 To put it another way, there are no point sources forB, as there are for E; there exists no magnetic analog to electric charge. This is the physical content of the statement ∇ · B = 0. Coulomb and others believed that magnetism was produced by magnetic charges (magnetic monopoles, as we would now call them), and in some older books you will still find references to a magnetic version of Coulomb’s law, giving the force of attraction or repulsion between them. It was Ampère who first speculated that all magnetic effects are attributable to electric charges in motion (currents). As far as we know, Ampère was right; nevertheless, it remains an open experimental question whether magnetic monopoles exist in nature (they are obviously pretty rare, or somebody would have found one), and in fact some recent elementary particle theories require them. For our purposes, though, B is divergenceless, and there are no magnetic monopoles. It takes a moving electric charge to produce a magnetic field, and it takes another moving electric charge to “feel” a magnetic field.
Griffiths has written I think 3 undergrad physics textbooks and all 3 are among of the most widely-used and widely-praised textbooks in undergrad physics. I for one find them far more readable and pedagogical than other textbooks on the same topics (of which I’ve also read many). He obviously thinks that lots of italics makes text easier to follow—I presume because somewhat-confused students can see where the emphasis / surprise is, along with other aspects of sentence structure. And I think he’s right!
For my part, I don’t have that association. I associate italics with “someone trying to make it easy for me to parse what they’re saying”. I tend to associate it with blog posts, honestly. I wish papers and textbooks would use it more.
Here’s a pretty typical few sentences from Introduction to Electrodynamics, a textbook by David Griffiths:
Griffiths has written I think 3 undergrad physics textbooks and all 3 are among of the most widely-used and widely-praised textbooks in undergrad physics. I for one find them far more readable and pedagogical than other textbooks on the same topics (of which I’ve also read many). He obviously thinks that lots of italics makes text easier to follow—I presume because somewhat-confused students can see where the emphasis / surprise is, along with other aspects of sentence structure. And I think he’s right!