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 ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
