🚀 go-pugleaf

On May 3, 8:37 am, RP <no_mail_no_s...@yahoo.com> wrote:

[...]

> > It his difficult to conceive a mind that could see so much
> > more than his contemporaries yet miss so much that
> > we take for granted.  But whatever will we do with
> > our  20/20 hindsight if we don't use it to play tricks on
> > ourselves.
>
============
>
> Sue, I believe that people don't actually click the links and read the
> material. I prefer to quote the relevant passages. That being said:
>
> "By
> seeking the simplest differential equations which can be obeyed by an
> affine
> correlation there is reason to hope that a generalization of the
> gravitation
> equations will be found which includes the laws of the electromagnetic
> field.
> This hope has in fact been fulfilled although I do not know whether
> the formal
> connection so derived can really be regarded as an enrichment of
> physics
> as long as it does not yield any new physical connections. In
> particular a field
> theory can, to my mind, only be satisfactory when it permits the
> elementary
> electrical bodies to be represented as solutions free from
> singularities."

I see your point. If people  are too stubborn to click
on the links, a bit of ragged word wrapping is just what
they deserve.  Harumph! Spare the rod... I always say.

:-)

>
> Regarding Einstein's last thought in that passage concerning the
> requirement of a theory representing charged bodies free of
> singularities:  From Feynman (#2 below):
>
http://prola.aps.org/pdf/RMP/v21/i3/p425_1
>
> "(1) There is no such concept as "the" field, an independent entity
> with degrees of freedom of its own
> (2) There is no action of an elementary charge upon itself and
> consequently no problem of an infinity of energy of the
> electromagnetic field.
> (3) The symmetry between past and future in the prescription for the
> fields is not a mere logical possibility, as in the usual theory, but
> a postulational requirement."

I am still scratching my head over number 3 because it
appears often in cosmology and metaphysics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler%E2%80%93Feynman_absorber_theory

You nicely described a probability-amplitude in
another post. I think many students forget the
statistics of oscillators which are rolled into
that expression and erroneously assume something
physical of what was only a probability.

For the Cavendish balance that won't overload
a horse-drawn buggy, it seems of little consequence
if time is symmetric.

   * invariance with respect to time translation
      gives the well-known law of conservation of
      energy >>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether's_theorem

Atomic emission and absorption are not even
required for induction currents so there is
nothing to count to support a formalism that relies
on statistics.

Sue...