Posted by
glen ep ropella on
Jul 14, 2011; 5:25pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Electrodynamics-tp6583880p6584202.html
Excellent commentary! Thanks for sending that and thanks to your friend
for taking the time to read and respond. This sentence is especially
helpful: "So, the fact that the concept doesn't exist is
not a problem for relativity or anything else." Perhaps it shows that
your friend is tolerant enough of philosophy to recognize when a
nonexistent (or nonsensical?) component might matter and when it does not.
[sigh] I suppose I should write a proposal and farm it around for a
grant to choose some collection of border crossing philosophy/practical
artifacts and to choose a spread of of philosophers and practitioners
and pay them to seriously consider and comment on those artifacts. (Not
likely. ;-)
Bruce Sherwood wrote at 07/14/2011 09:08 AM:
> I sent the link to the "philosophical" paper on electromagnetism to a
> physicist colleague who is extremely knowledgeable about these
> matters. Here is what he says:
>
> Thanks Bruce, but I don't think this paper adds much to the literature
> on these matters.
>
> The philosophical papers by Frisch and Muller that the authors refer
> to are focused on the issues of self-fields and renormalization, ala
> Rohrlich and others. They question the consistency of classical
> electrodynamics as a dynamical theory, relativity aside.
>
> The authors seem to want to dredge up variations on the old issue of
> conventionalism, see the Reichenbach reference. The paragraph (Q1)(d)
> on page 4 begins to hint at some kind of ambiguity/conventionality in
> the relationship between physics represented in different frames (its
> quite confusing). They set up a maze of relations T_V, P_V and M_V on
> pages 10 and 11 to, in my opinion, muddy up the notion of
> corresponding states [there is a reference to Bell's paper on page 14
> that mentions these]. I just don't think there is any problem or
> ambiguity with the notion of corresponding states.
>
> The idea that the concept of an "electromagnetic field moving with
> velocity v(r, t) at point r and time t" must be meaningful in order to
> sort out what they portray as confusion about corresponding states is
> simply wrong headed. So, the fact that the concept doesn't exist is
> not a problem for relativity or anything else.
--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095,
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