(Note: I also posted this on a physics forum, but I thought I would try here as well as undoubtedly some members may be qualified to say something
about it.)
According to a more reliable source, http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physic...OfLight/c.html "That continued until the 1870s, when Helmholtz discredited Weber's force law on the grounds
of energy conservation, and Maxwell's more complete theory of propagating waves prevailed."
However, from the first link:
"The immediate topic is Helmholtz’s objection, that Weber’s Electrical Law could lead to the possibility of infinite work arising from a finite
amount of work. Weber shows that for Helmholtz’s fears to be realized, electrical particles would have to move at enormous relative velocities,
exceeding the constant c. He thus arrives at a concept of a limiting velocity, quite similar to that found 35 years later in the Special Theory of
Relativity, yet arrived at by an entirely different process than that which leads Einstein to this assumption."
Can someone comment on this?
Even more audaciously, near the end he mentions another "accomplishment of Weber, the refutation of Clausius’ thermodynamics and the Helmholtz
Energy Principle.[16]"
Well, I see that the Smithsonian Libraries has the reference [16], but in the original German, and unlike some of the other Weber works, I can find
neither a translation nor online version.
Thanks in advance for anyone that can clear up my confusions with this.
This is very heady stuff I kid you not. Your confusion arises as it does in
all thinking individuals when the sanitized version of formal pedagogy is
seen to falter in the light of conflicting observations. It may surprise you
to know that scientific theories , those that are accepted orthodoxy ,
are actually those which are fashionable , much the same as " strings "
are now all the rage in field and particle physics. The reason too is that
with the exception of a very small community of physicists these sorts
of questions are seldom ever asked any longer. In the nineteenth
century it was then the practice to resolve these questions of natural
phenomenon with simple apparatus and desktop experiments.
I cited this in an earlier related thread http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=3216&a...
The best one can say of this is that Electrostatics , Magnetostatics ,
and Electrodynamics is just as the calculus used to describe it. Integral
calculus is just a bag of tricks which is wielded with cleverness to
produce useful results. It is by no means complete and self consistent
as no theorem exists to find integrals. In the same way Electrical theory
is a patchwork of methods each suitable in its own way to the given
application. The application of the principle of Occam's Razor " when you
have two competing theories which make exactly the same predictions,
the one that is simpler is the better" is often just more practical. See _ http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/occam.html
.Nixie - 10-6-2007 at 22:15
Thanks! That seems to answer my first question, though as a non-physicist I'm not qualified to evaluate that paper, and I've not traced any
discussion of their arguments in other papers.
The more interesting claim about thermodynamics remains; I've not seen any mention in it other than the original site (which, by the way, is a
LaRouche site so its neutrality is very questionable).12AX7 - 11-6-2007 at 14:05
Quote:
Originally posted by franklyn
those that are accepted orthodoxy ,
are actually those which are fashionable , much the same as " strings "
are now all the rage in field and particle physics.
Oddly, the physics profs at my school don't find much about string theory. One said "it's at about the same point it was in the 70s: 'about thirty
years off' from a breakthrough".
It's just more advertized in e.g. Popular Science because that's where the progress, well not necessarily progress, but let's say action, is. The
Standard Model has been fleshed out as best it can, save for a few extraordinarily tedious, powerful (and expensive!) particle experiments probing the
deeper mysteries that remain.
Tim
P.S. Why do you post like Rosco? Surely you know that no space belongs to the left of punctuation, and you can use whoooooooole liiiiines
--------> all the way out to here even.Nixie - 11-6-2007 at 16:24
12AX7, you should take out the channel from your signature, since no one is there. I'm only running #diyaudio
