Talk-Polywell.org

Trouble with the Lorentz law of force: Incompatibility with special relativity and momentum conservation

Not taking sides until I find time to read the paper, in a few millenia...

interesting - thanks DeltaV - i hadn't realized there were such inconsistencies.

This idea has been around for a while. Usually people who believe it wait until they retire before they write a book on it, because it is not good for a career.

The book I've had on this subject is Newtonian Electrodynamics, by Peter and Neil Graneau. Peter concluded there was something wrong with modern electrodynamics when he was working with railguns, which he says have a deflection of the rails at the "muzzle" which is opposite what Lorentz predicts. He's done a number of experiments to support his ideas. I actually got a call from him one night to chat about a test Jeff Kooistra talked me into trying on a low-powered railgun in my garage.

http://www.amazon.com/Newtonian-Electro ... 981022284X

I gather the source of all this is a missing term. Proponents of the alternate theory say Ampere had the correct formulation, Grassmann reformulated using his newly invented vector calculus, and Grassmann dropped a term he considered always summed to zero. Lorentz used Grassmann's formula. Maxwell used Lorentz. Einstein used Maxwell.

According to the paper linked above, Einstein noted a problem with Lorentz in 1908 and published a tweak that the paper above trys to prove is the correct formulation.

If I follow the Graneau arguments, this has something to do with Einsteinian Relativity being covariant rather than invariant. In the paper above they're focussing on a momentum term incompatible with SR. Either way, it looks as if some mighty fine minds have all taken swipes at Lorentz.

You need a covariant form of Lorentz. And all you need is force on charged particle, since current is just moving charge.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_fo ... entz_force

This is consistent. The argument above is straw man I think.

I thought the lorentz force drops out of Maxwell's equations after some manipulation and defining the remaining terms as divergence of the maxwell stress tensor.