The colleague is Mark Haugan, a general relativist at Purdue. He has
physics majors. His intent is to build on the two semesters of our
19th-century perspective on intro physics. His idea is that if
On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 11:25 AM, glen e. p. ropella
>
> 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,
http://tempusdictum.com>
>
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