W Farrell Edwards

W. Farrell Edwards
Residence	Logan, UT, United States
Nationality	USA
Known for	The Edwards transformation (anisotropic one-way speed of light); the "Edwards effect" and its subsequent null result
Scientific career
Fields	Professor of Physics
Institutions	Utah State University, Logan

W. Farrell Edwards is an American physicist, professor emeritus of physics at Utah State University, where he taught for fifty-eight years. He is cited in the dissident literature for a 1976 experiment reporting an electric potential outside a superconducting coil carrying a steady current — an effect forbidden by Maxwell's electrodynamics. He is cited in the mainstream literature for something else entirely, and rather more durably: the Edwards transformation of 1963, which set out the most general coordinate transformation permitting an anisotropic one-way speed of light while keeping the measured two-way speed isotropic.

Both belong on this page, and so does a fact that is usually left out when the 1976 result is invoked: Edwards later published the null result himself.

Career

Edwards is a native of Logan, Utah. He took his bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics at the University of Utah in 1955, and his master's and doctorate at Caltech in 1957 and 1960, the latter on conversion coefficients in deformed nuclei. He joined the Utah State University faculty in 1959, headed the physics department from 1966 to 1971, directed the university's Honors Program in 1988–89, and helped establish the Space Dynamics Laboratory. He retired in spring 2017 after fifty-eight years, and remains on the emeritus roll.

He was Utah State's Professor of the Year in 1977 and received the Utah Governor's Medal for Science and Technology. He is remembered locally for teaching in an orange cape as "Phearless Farrell the Fizisist". His son, Boyd F. Edwards, is also a physicist at Utah State — the two are easily confused in the literature.

His research ranged widely: nuclear spectroscopy at Caltech with Felix Boehm and J. W. M. DuMond; a classical derivation of the London equations published in Physical Review Letters in 1981; and, over some twenty-five years, plasma physics and magnetic confinement, including work on stationary two-fluid plasma equilibria with internal electric fields and later experiments on the STOR-1M tokamak.

The Edwards transformation

His most-cited paper is "Special Relativity in Anisotropic Space", published in the American Journal of Physics in 1963.

The question it addresses is the conventionality of simultaneity. The two-way speed of light — out to a mirror and back — is directly measurable and is isotropic. The one-way speed is not independently measurable, because measuring it requires two clocks that have already been synchronised, and synchronising them requires an assumption about the one-way speed. Einstein's choice of synchronisation makes the one-way speed isotropic by convention rather than by measurement.

Edwards derived the most general transformation that allows the one-way speed to be anisotropic while preserving the isotropy of the two-way speed and the empirical content of relativity, reducing to the Lorentz transformation when the anisotropy parameter vanishes. The work anticipates J. A. Winnie's better-known treatment of 1970 and remains a standard reference in the philosophical literature on simultaneity.

This matters for a wiki like this one for a reason worth stating: it is a rigorous, mainstream-published demonstration that a genuine convention sits at the foundation of special relativity — which is a good deal more useful to a critic than most of what is asserted about the subject. He followed it in 1965 with an experimental investigation of the second postulate.

The "Edwards effect"

The 1976 experiment

Standard electrodynamics predicts that a closed, charge-neutral conductor carrying a steady current, at rest, produces no external electric field. Edwards, with C. S. Kenyon and D. K. Lemon, reported that it does.

"Continuing investigation into possible electric fields arising from steady conduction currents" (Physical Review D 14, 922, 1976) measured the potential around superconducting coils of niobium–titanium, niobium and lead, and reported a potential varying as the square of the current — a fit to φ ∝ Iⁿ giving n = 2.02 ± 0.05. A second-order dependence of this kind is what one would expect if the electric force carried a term depending on the velocity of the source charges, as Weber's force law does and Maxwell's does not. The authors examined and rejected the obvious conventional culprits: the self-Hall effect, configurational EMFs, thermoelectric effects, flux-flow EMFs and charge transfer on helium bubbles.

The null result

The claim was challenged immediately, most directly by D. F. Bartlett and B. F. L. Ward in Physical Review D the following year, asking whether an electron's charge is independent of its velocity.

What happened next is the part usually omitted. Edwards did not defend the result against his critic — he worked with him. He and Bartlett published jointly on the invariance of charge under Lorentz transformation in 1990 and on theories of macroscopic charge in 1992. And in the same year, Lemon, Edwards and Kenyon — the original team — published "Electric potentials associated with steady conduction currents in superconducting coils" in Physics Letters A, reporting further experiments on charge-neutral coils of the same three materials and concluding that the earlier effects were not departures from conventional electromagnetic theory, with the null result predicted by Maxwell confirmed to within about two parts in a thousand.

A conventional mechanism for the original signal was subsequently identified: Poklonski and Lopatin argued in 1998 that the potential arises from polarisation of the resistor in the circuit by the kinetic energy of the electrons in the superconducting coil, giving a quadratic dependence on current with no new physics at all.

Why it is still cited

The 1976 paper remains a standard citation in the Weber-electrodynamics revival, where it is offered as experimental evidence for a velocity-dependent electric force absent from Maxwell's theory — for example in Andre K T Assis, Rodrigues and Mania's 1999 paper in Foundations of Physics on the field outside a resistive wire, and in Baumgärtel and Maher's 2022 review of Weber's force law.

Anyone following that citation should know that the experiment's own authors withdrew the interpretation sixteen years later. To their credit, at least some recent Weber-based papers cite the 1992 null result and concede that the measurements fall well below prediction.

This is worth stating without embarrassment. An experimental claim that was made carefully, challenged, re-tested by the people who made it, and then given up is science working as it should — and it is more useful to this wiki as an example of that than it would be as a suppressed anomaly.

The paper on this wiki

The item catalogued here, Inertial Mass of the Electron (2002), could not be located in any citation index, and its place of publication has not been independently confirmed.

Reception and affiliation

No evidence has been found that Edwards belonged to the Natural Philosophy Alliance or CNPS, attended their conferences, or published in Galilean Electrodynamics. His standing in the dissident literature is entirely second-hand: others cite his 1976 experiment. He appears to have been a conventional and well-decorated university physicist throughout his career.

Selected publications

• "Special Relativity in Anisotropic Space", American Journal of Physics 31(7), 482 (1963).
• Waddoups, Edwards and Merrill, "Experimental Investigation of the Second Postulate of Special Relativity", Journal of the Optical Society of America 55 (1965).
• Edwards, Kenyon and Lemon, "Continuing investigation into possible electric fields arising from steady conduction currents", Physical Review D 14, 922 (1976).
• "Classical Derivation of the London Equations", Physical Review Letters 47, 1863 (1981).
• Lemon, Edwards and Kenyon, "Electric potentials associated with steady conduction currents in superconducting coils", Physics Letters A 162, 105 (1992).
• Edwards and Held, "Stationary Equilibria of Two Fluid Plasmas Having Significant, Internal, Static Electric Fields", Physical Review Letters (2004).

Papers on this wiki

• 2002 – Inertial Mass of the Electron

See also

• Wilhelm Weber
• Andre K T Assis
• Special Relativity

External links

• Emeritus profile, Utah State University.
• "A road well travelled: Farrell Edwards retires after 58 years at USU".