Re: Knowing what you know not about what should be known

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@MINDSPRING.COM>]

At 11:32 PM -0500 6/20/04, John Clement wrote:

> But this is explainable by the idea that the
> field is spread out over an area so its strength decreases as the area
> increases.

I was disabused of this geometrical idea early on in my college
career when it was pointed out to me that there are all sorts of
interactions that do *not* follow the inverse square law. Since the
derivation of Gauss's law explicitly depends on the geometric
argument, it is easy to show that it only applies to those
interactions that happen to obey the inverse square law. It's not the
other way round.

Hugh
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Hugh Haskell
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<mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>

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