| Date: Wed, 9 Jan 2002 18:38:22
-0600
Dear Anthony,
Reply is for your
benefit only.
Cute comments are not
science. No further comment is necessary. For your benefit, we will
give him a bit to think about on charge as energy.
In physics, one is
perfectly free to choose the fundamental units he wishes to use for his
physics model. Indeed, there already are already perfectly valid
physics models using only one fundamental unit, and they are well-known
and actually used in physics. For those in classical EM and electrical
engineering, simply check Jackson, Classical Electrodynamics, Third
Edition, who also confirms it.
E.g., suppose we build
a physics model using only the fundamental unit "joule". Then all other
entities become energy and functions of energy. We have no problem,
after the nuclear age, with mass as energy -- the old E = m
(c-squared). It gets a bit dicier to think of time as energy, but so it
is. And so is length.
And so is charge.
Certainly we can model it in that fashion, simply by changing to the
model indicated. So one is not justified to just snippily conclude that
"charge is not energy". There are no absolute statements in physics;
there are only the absolute predictions, assumptions, or findings of a
particular model. The same remarks were once made about mass. Models
change. And so does physics.
Now ask your friend to
explain to you in his model, how a charge (which he believes is not
energy) continuously pours out
EM energy in all directions in 3-space, without any
input of EM energy in
3-space. Easy to prove it. Simply produce a charge at a point in the
lab. Its fields and potentials and their energy will reach one
light-second distance in any direction in space, one second later. One
year later, those same fields and potentials will have reached a surface
on out beyond the solar system, at one-light year radius away. And
they're still traveling outward at the speed of light, while all the
originally detected new field and potential values at lesser radii are
still there and being continuously maintained. In short, that is a
continuous EM flow. Every charge in the original matter of the universe
has been pouring out EM energy, continuously, in this fashion for some
14 billion years.
So by simply paying
once to produce that one little
charge (e.g., to lift it from the Dirac sea will require only
a certain amount of one-time input energy), you have now caused a change
in the EM energy density in all of a vast volume of surrounding space
that is a lightyear in radius, and the energy flow is still ongoing from
the charge. From whence is coming this steady outpouring of EM energy
from the charge, outward from the charge in all directions in 3-space?
Either this problem
has an explanation of where an equal input of EM energy is coming from,
or else we have falsified the entire conservation of energy law by a
very simple experiment. It only takes one white crow to prove that not
all crows are black. U(1) electrodynamics has not been forthcoming with
the explanation.
Have your friend try
to explain the source of that enormous amount of output energy in the
classical U(1) EM model. It's called the unresolved problem of the
source charge, or the problem of the source charge and its association
with its fields that it creates, and all their energy that it also
produces. Sen (and others) calls it the most difficult problem in
electrodynamics, both quantal and classical. We have at least proposed
a solution consistent with higher group symmetry electrodynamics,
quantum field theory, and particle physics.
But please do not pass
along to me any other such cute comments. I simply have no time for
such.
Tom Bearden
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