[Physltest] [Phys-L] Re: accelerating charge

[Carl Mungan <mungan@USNA.EDU>]

> I disagree with Carl's description of the work.

Fair enough, I'll admit I didn't read it closely but just picked out
a few points, probably with a very selective bias.

> The question of which of these is
> relevant can be settled by experiment, but the experiment
> has not been done and is not easily doable.

Yes, I agree.

> But let me quickly point out that [1] has problems of its
> own.  It protects Einstein's principle of equivalence, at
> the cost of violating Galileo's principle of relativity!

OTOH, should we expect Galilean relativity to hold for infinitely
long, constant acceleration?

> It is amusing that there could exist such a simple physics
> question for which no cut-and-dried answer is known.

Yes, this is for me the most important point of the whole matter and
explains why it caught my attention in the first place. In some
sense, it's always the "simple" questions that are most interesting.

> But I suspect whenever you have two formulas that differ by an
> integration by parts, you can create some kind of mystery
> by pushing the boundary terms into the far past and future.

Interesting speculation. Can you think of some other examples? Carl
--
Carl E. Mungan, Asst. Prof. of Physics  410-293-6680 (O) -3729 (F)
       U.S. Naval Academy, Stop 9C, Annapolis, MD 21402-5040
mailto:mungan@usna.edu       http://usna.edu/Users/physics/mungan/
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