Electromagnetism
This Natural Philosophy wiki page disputes content found on Wikipedia page wikipedia:Electromagnetism
Electromagnetism is the study of electricity, magnetism and their connection with light. In its standard modern form it is expressed by Maxwell's equations as reformulated by Oliver Heaviside, together with the Lorentz force law, and it is generally regarded as the most successful and best-tested theory in physics.
The literature collected on this wiki does not dispute that the standard formulation works. It disputes that it is complete, that it is correctly founded, and in several cases that it describes what is physically happening at all. The objections are not variations on a single theme: they come from different directions and are not always compatible with one another. What they share is the conviction that electromagnetism was settled prematurely — that between about 1820 and 1890 a set of live alternatives was narrowed to one, and that the discarded options were dropped for reasons of mathematical convenience rather than experimental refutation.
This article sets out the standard account briefly, then the principal lines of objection found in the papers archived here, then the disagreements among the objectors themselves.
The standard account
On the received view, electric and magnetic fields are physical entities that fill space and carry energy and momentum. Charges create fields; fields propagate at the speed of light; fields exert forces on charges through the Lorentz force F = q(E + v × B). Maxwell's displacement current term makes the equations consistent with charge conservation and yields wave solutions travelling at c, identifying light as an electromagnetic wave. Because the theory is Lorentz-invariant it required no revision when special relativity arrived; instead it became relativity's model.
Two historical facts about this formulation matter to the criticisms that follow. First, the force law in use is not Ampère's. Ampère's original law of 1820–1825 was displaced by Grassmann's of 1845, which survives as the Lorentz force; the two give identical results for complete circuits but different results for isolated current elements. Second, the equations in use are not Maxwell's as he wrote them. Maxwell's Treatise presented a larger set in quaternion form; the compact four-equation vector formulation universally taught today is Heaviside's reduction of the 1880s.
The case against the standard formulation on this wiki
Ampère's original force law and longitudinal forces
The largest single body of work here concerns the force between current elements. Ampère's original law contains a component acting along the direction of current flow, so that a current-carrying conductor is placed under longitudinal tension. The Grassmann–Lorentz law has no such component. Since the two agree for closed circuits, the question can only be settled where a circuit is broken, deformed, or destroyed — and that is where these researchers look.
Peter Graneau and Neal Graneau made this the centre of a research programme, arguing in "Ampere Electrodynamics" (1993) and "Only Ampere Forces Explain Railgun Recoil and Wire Explosions" (1994) that wires which explode when carrying large currents fragment into short segments under longitudinal tension, and that railgun recoil is transmitted through the conductors in a way the Lorentz force does not predict. Paul Wesley supplied theoretical support across several 1987 papers, including "Ampere Repulsion and Graneau's Exploding Wires" and "Ampere Repulsion Drives the Graneau-Hering Submarine and Hering's Pump".
Thomas E Phipps pursued the same question experimentally, reporting positive results in "New Evidence for Ampère Longitudinal Forces" (1990) and later by force-modulation methods (2005), and argued in "Ampere Tension and Newton's Laws" (1993) that the issue is ultimately about whether electrodynamic forces obey Newton's third law. Panos Pappas and Moyssides conducted the much-discussed Ampère bridge experiments; Rémi Saumont reported measurements of the longitudinal force in 1995; James Keele derived and tested the law in 2002 and 2006; Harold Aspden, Domina Eberle Spencer and Jorge A Guala-Valverde each contributed analyses.
Weber electrodynamics
A related tradition revives Wilhelm Weber's force law of 1846, in which the force between two charges depends not only on their separation but on their relative velocity and acceleration, and acts directly between them rather than through an intermediary field. Andre K T Assis has been its principal modern advocate, reviewing the experimental situation in "Modern Experiments Related to Weber's Electrodynamics" (1989). Paul Wesley extended it to fields, waves and radiation in a series of 1987–1990 papers, and Thomas E Phipps worked toward a modernised version in "Toward Modernization of Weber's Force Law" (1990).
The attraction of Weber's law for these authors is that it is a genuine force law between particles, requiring no field to carry the interaction, and that it reproduces the standard results in the regimes where those have been tested.
Coulomb's law as the only law needed
A third line argues that no separate magnetic force exists at all — that magnetism is what Coulomb's law looks like when the charges are moving, once the analysis is done properly. Jan Olof Jonson has developed this position over two decades, from "The Magnetic Force Between Two Currents Explained Using Only Coulomb's Law" (1997) to "Turning Back to Coulomb's Law as a Basis for Electromagnetism" (2008), and has applied it to the Ampère bridge experiments and to the comparison of Ampère's law, Coulomb's law and the Lorentz force (2010).
Charles William Lucas pursues a related reduction from the side of particle structure, deriving in "Derivation of the Classical Universal Electrodynamic Force" (2006) a single force law intended to cover electrostatics, magnetism, induction and radiation together.
Maxwell's equations: reduced, modified, or wrong
Several researchers accept fields but reject the standard equations governing them.
Thomas E Phipps argued for a first-order modification, replacing the partial time derivative with a total (convective) derivative to obtain equations invariant under the Hertzian rather than the Lorentz group — "First-Order Modification of Maxwell's Equations" (1983) and "On Hertz's Invariant Form of Maxwell's Equations" (1993). Charles William Lucas set the electrodynamics of extended particles against the standard equations in "Electrodynamics of Real Particles vs. Maxwell's Equations, Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics" (1992). David Tombe examined the relation between Maxwell's equations and Galilean relativity (1984).
A distinct historical claim concerns Heaviside's reduction. Tom Bearden argued in "Maxwell's Lost Unified Field Theory" (1988) that the compression of Maxwell's original system into four vector equations discarded physically meaningful structure, and Eric R Laithwaite's "Oliver Heaviside - Establishment Shaker" (1982) treats the episode historically. Whether anything of physical content was actually lost is disputed even among critics, but the point of agreement is that the equations everyone calls Maxwell's are not the ones Maxwell wrote.
Displacement current and the Catt objection
Ivor Catt, a digital electronics engineer who came to the subject through the practical behaviour of fast signals in transmission lines, mounts the most radical objection recorded here. Across "Displacement Current" (1978), "Maxwell's Equations Revisited" (1980) and "The Death of Electric Current" (1982), he argues that displacement current is a fiction introduced to patch a theory, that electric current as ordinarily conceived does not exist, and that what actually propagates is a transverse electromagnetic (TEM) step travelling in the space between conductors at the speed of light — the conductors guiding the energy rather than carrying it.
"The Catt Question" puts the challenge in its sharpest form: when a TEM step advances along a transmission line, the charge that appears on the conductor surface must come from somewhere, and Catt argues that no standard account answers the question consistently. The question has been circulated to academic electromagnetism teachers for decades and the disagreement among the answers received is, for Catt, the point.
Instantaneous action versus field propagation
If forces act instantaneously at a distance, the field is not needed as a physical carrier. Harold Aspden proposed an "Instantaneous Electrodynamic Potential with Retarded Energy Transfer" (1988), separating the propagation of force from the propagation of energy. Wolfgang Engelhardt argued for "Instantaneous Interaction between Charged Particles" (2005), and Neal Graneau and Peter Graneau set out "The Evidence and Consequences of Newtonian Instantaneous Forces" the same year. Ralph Sansbury made the case in "The Speed of Light: Cumulative Instantaneous Forces at a Distance" (2012). The parallel argument for gravitation is Tom Van Flandern's, in his several papers on the speed of gravity.
Structure: the electron as an extended object
A final line holds that the difficulties of classical electromagnetism — above all the infinite self-energy of a point charge — are consequences of an assumption about the electron rather than about the field. The toroidal ring tradition documented here, developed by David L Bergman, Charles William Lucas, Domina Eberle Spencer and the Common Sense Science group, models the electron as an extended ring of circulating charge, from whose geometry the electron's mass, spin and magnetic moment are intended to follow without divergences.
The medium
Underlying much of the above is the question the nineteenth century thought it had to answer and the twentieth thought it had dissolved: whether the electromagnetic wave is a wave in something. Many researchers here hold that it is, and the wiki's aether literature is largely continuous with its electromagnetic literature.
Disagreements among the critics
These positions are not a single alternative theory, and the arguments between them are as sharp as those with the mainstream. The clearest case concerns the Ampère experiments.
Jan Olof Jonson has repeatedly examined the evidence offered for longitudinal forces and concluded against it. His "detailed evaluation of the Pappas–Moyssides Ampère bridge experiments" (2009) and his rejection of Wesley's account of Graneau's exploding wires argue that the observations follow from Coulomb's law with relativistic corrections, and that no longitudinal force need be postulated. If he is right, the largest body of anti-Lorentz evidence on this wiki is explained by a law nobody disputes.
The instantaneous-action and field-modification programmes are likewise in tension: Phipps's modified Maxwell equations retain propagating fields, while Weber, Jonson and the instantaneous-force authors dispense with the field as a physical carrier. And Catt's rejection of electric current is difficult to reconcile with the Ampère programme, which takes currents and the forces between them as its subject matter.
Recording these disputes is not a qualification of the case against the standard formulation; it is what distinguishes a research literature from a doctrine.
Researchers on this wiki
- Peter Graneau, Neal Graneau — Ampère forces; exploding wires, railgun recoil; instantaneous forces
- Paul Wesley — Ampère repulsion; Weber–Wesley electrodynamics
- Thomas E Phipps — longitudinal-force experiments; Hertzian-invariant modification of Maxwell
- Andre K T Assis — Weber electrodynamics
- Panos Pappas — the Ampère bridge experiments
- Rémi Saumont — measurement of the longitudinal force
- James Keele — derivation and test of Ampère's law
- Jan Olof Jonson — electromagnetism from Coulomb's law alone; critic of the longitudinal-force evidence
- Ivor Catt — displacement current, the TEM step, the Catt Question
- Charles William Lucas — universal electrodynamic force; electrodynamics of extended particles
- David L Bergman, Domina Eberle Spencer — ring models of the electron
- Harold Aspden, Wolfgang Engelhardt, Ralph Sansbury — instantaneous interaction
- Tom Bearden, Eric R Laithwaite — the Heaviside reduction of Maxwell
- David Tombe — Maxwell's equations and Galilean relativity
- Jorge A Guala-Valverde — Ampère electrodynamics and rotational experiments
Papers on this wiki
Ampère's force law and longitudinal forces
- 1987 — Paul Wesley, "Ampere Repulsion and Graneau's Exploding Wires"
- 1987 — Paul Wesley, "Ampere's Original Force Law Compared with the Moyssides-Pappas Results"
- 1990 — Thomas E Phipps, "New Evidence for Ampère Longitudinal Forces"
- 1993 — Peter Graneau and Neal Graneau, "Ampere Electrodynamics"
- 1993 — Thomas E Phipps, "Ampere Tension and Newton's Laws"
- 1994 — Peter Graneau and Neal Graneau, "Only Ampere Forces Explain Railgun Recoil and Wire Explosions"
- 1995 — Rémi Saumont, "La Force Longitudinale d'Ampère"
- 2002 — James Keele, "Theoretical Derivation of Ampere's Law"
- 2008 — Jorge A Guala-Valverde, "Ampere: The Avis Phoenix of Electrodynamics"
Weber electrodynamics
- 1987 — Paul Wesley, "Weber Electrodynamics with Fields, Waves, and Absolute Space"
- 1989 — Andre K T Assis, "Modern Experiments Related to Weber's Electrodynamics"
- 1990 — Thomas E Phipps, "Toward Modernization of Weber's Force Law"
Coulomb's law as foundation
- 1997 — Jan Olof Jonson, "The Magnetic Force Between Two Currents Explained Using Only Coulomb's Law"
- 2006 — Charles William Lucas, "Derivation of the Classical Universal Electrodynamic Force"
- 2008 — Jan Olof Jonson, "Turning Back to Coulomb's Law as a Basis for Electromagnetism"
- 2010 — Jan Olof Jonson, "A Comparison between Ampere's Law, Coulomb's Law and the Lorentz Force"
Maxwell's equations and the Heaviside reduction
- 1982 — Eric R Laithwaite, "Oliver Heaviside - Establishment Shaker"
- 1983 — Thomas E Phipps, "First-Order Modification of Maxwell's Equations"
- 1984 — David Tombe, "Maxwell's Equations and Galilean Relativity"
- 1988 — Tom Bearden, "Maxwell's Lost Unified Field Theory"
- 1992 — Charles William Lucas, "Electrodynamics of Real Particles vs. Maxwell's Equations, Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics"
- 1993 — Thomas E Phipps, "On Hertz's Invariant Form of Maxwell's Equations"
Displacement current and the TEM wave
- 1978 — Ivor Catt, "Displacement Current"
- 1979 — Ivor Catt, "The History of Displacement Current"
- 1980 — Ivor Catt, "Maxwell's Equations Revisited"
- 1982 — Ivor Catt, "The Death of Electric Current"
- 1984 — Ivor Catt, "Fundamentals of Electromagnetic Energy Transfer"
- — Ivor Catt, "The Catt Question"
Instantaneous interaction
- 1988 — Harold Aspden, "Instantaneous Electrodynamic Potential with Retarded Energy Transfer"
- 2005 — Wolfgang Engelhardt, "Instantaneous Interaction between Charged Particles"
- 2005 — Neal Graneau and Peter Graneau, "The Evidence and Consequences of Newtonian Instantaneous Forces"
- 2012 — Ralph Sansbury, "The Speed of Light: Cumulative Instantaneous Forces at a Distance"
Critiques from within the dissenting literature
- 2009 — Jan Olof Jonson, "A Detailed 'Wesley Evaluation' of the Pappas–Moyssides Experiments on Ampère's Bridge"
See also
- Aether — the medium in which many researchers here hold electromagnetic waves to propagate
- Toroidal Ring — extended-structure models of the electron
- Common Sense Science
- Light
- Electric Universe and Plasma Cosmology — electromagnetic forces at astronomical scale
- Special Relativity — which took the standard formulation as its model