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. ============================================================ 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
