New Gaussian Electrodynamics
| Scientific Theory | |
|---|---|
| Name | New Gaussian Electrodynamics |
| Type | Reformulation of classical electromagnetism |
| Author(s) | Parry Moon, Domina Eberle Spencer, Philip J Mann, Uma Y Shama |
| Keywords | Ampère force law, force between current elements, universal time, absolute simultaneity, holors, Electrodynamics |
| Year | 1950s–present |
New Gaussian Electrodynamics (sometimes called Gaussian dynamics or simply Gaussian electrodynamics on this wiki) is a reformulation of classical electromagnetic theory developed from the 1950s by the MIT electrical engineer Parry Moon and the mathematician Domina Eberle Spencer, and carried on after Moon's death by Spencer with Philip J Mann, Uma Y Shama and others. It rebuilds electrodynamics on Ampère's original force law rather than the Grassmann–Lorentz force of the textbooks, and couples this to a universal-time account of the velocity of light in place of Einstein's relativity of simultaneity.
The name honours Carl Friedrich Gauss, who held that the fundamental problem of electrodynamics is to find the correct force between two relatively moving charges — the question the programme takes as its starting point.
The central claims
Ampère's force, not Grassmann's
In 1823 Ampère gave a law for the force between two current elements. In 1845 Grassmann gave a different one, the expression now known as the Lorentz force, and it is Grassmann's, not Ampère's, that entered the textbooks. The two are not equivalent: the Ampère force is a central force, directed along the line joining the two elements, and so obeys Newton's third law in its strong form between the elements; the Grassmann–Lorentz force does not, and for open circuits it yields a net force on an isolated system, which standard theory balances by assigning momentum to the field.
The New Gaussian programme holds that the nineteenth century chose wrongly, and that the Weber–Gauss–Ampère tradition — central forces derived from a scalar potential and depending on the relative velocity of charges — is the correct foundation. The fullest statement is Moon and Spencer's book Foundations of Electrodynamics (1960), prized for its physical directness, and the position is developed across many later papers, notably Mann's "The Force Between Current Elements" (Physics Essays, 1994).
Universal time and the velocity of light
The programme rejects Einstein's second postulate as usually read, holding instead to a universal-time postulate: that a single, frame-independent time is physically real, and that the constancy of the speed of light applies with respect to a preferred frame rather than to every observer. Uma Y Shama developed this strand and its bearing on real navigation, connecting it to the GPS system and to the Sagnac effect, and the group reinterpreted the classic tests in this light — most pointedly in "A New Interpretation of the Hafele-Keating Experiment" (1996).
Electromagnetism without a separate magnetic field, and holors
Two further features distinguish the programme. Following their 1954 paper "Electromagnetism Without Magnetism", Moon and Spencer sought to express electromagnetic effects without a separately real magnetic field, treating what is usually called magnetism as a consequence of the force between moving charges. And the whole scheme is often cast in the holor formalism — the Moon–Spencer generalization of scalars, vectors and tensors — which the group applied from electrodynamics to chemistry.
Method: three viewpoints
A characteristic working method, prominent in the papers of Mann and Shama, is the "three viewpoints" analysis: taking one experiment — the Hering furnace, overhead welding, unipolar induction, the Graneau railgun — and working it through classical electromagnetic theory, Weber's equation, and the new Gaussian equation side by side, so that the point at which the formulations diverge is made explicit.
On this wiki
The programme is one of the more coherent bodies of dissident work catalogued here, pursued over decades by a small, connected group who also helped found the Natural Philosophy Alliance:
- Parry Moon (1898–1988) and Domina Eberle Spencer (1920–2022) — the originators
- Philip J Mann — the force-between-current-elements work and the Hafele–Keating reinterpretation
- Uma Y Shama — the GPS and velocity-of-light strand, and holor representations
It connects to the wider revival of Ampère's force law pursued on this wiki by Andre K T Assis and Peter Graneau, and to the Electrodynamics article, where the Ampère-versus-Grassmann dispute is set out.
Assessment
The New Gaussian programme is unusually disciplined for this field: it concentrates on specific laboratory configurations where competing force laws give different answers — railguns, exploding wires, the Hering furnace, unipolar generators — rather than arguing from interpretation, and it was built by people, Moon and Spencer above all, whose mainstream credentials in engineering and mathematics are not in question. That is the right way to conduct the dispute, and it lends the work weight.
Two difficulties are, however, structural.
The force-law question is hard to settle experimentally because the Ampère and Grassmann laws are a classical theorem apart only for the fictitious current element; for closed circuits — which is what any real experiment involves — they predict identical net forces. Detecting a difference requires isolating part of a circuit in a way that is very difficult to do cleanly, and this wiki's own contributors reach opposite conclusions about whether the Pappas–Moyssides bridge experiments did so. The wider claim that field momentum can be dispensed with must also contend with the fact that field momentum is directly measurable (the Graham–Lahoz experiment), not merely a bookkeeping device.
The universal-time claim rests on a subtlety that cuts against it. Distant simultaneity in special relativity is a synchronisation convention, and the phenomena the group reads as evidence for a preferred frame — the Sagnac effect, the GPS timing corrections — are equally well described within relativity, where the Sagnac term is the failure of Einstein synchronisation to close around a rotating path. The tested predictions the programme reinterprets, from Hafele–Keating to stellar aberration, remain consistent with special relativity, whose account has since been confirmed by measurements (muon lifetimes, Ives–Stilwell, modern cavity tests) that the reinterpretations do not address.
What the programme retains, and what makes it worth reading, is its clarity about where the choice actually lies — between two force laws that agree on all closed-circuit measurements, and between two time conventions that agree on all physical coincidences. That is a sharper statement of the issues than much of the surrounding literature offers, even for a reader who concludes that the standard choices were the right ones.