Re: quantum of electric flux?

[John Denker <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>]

> At 04:16 PM 3/10/00 -0500, Ludwik Kowalski wrote:
>
> >  It is like saying that the total charge in a
> >room is quantized but in one half that room it is not.

To which I replied at 06:24 PM 3/10/00 -0500:

> That is an absurd statement as applied to charge, but charge is not the
> same as flux.

Let me go one better:

The foregoing statement is absurd as applied to _point_ charges, but that's
an important restriction.  In particular, suppose that tomorrow experiment
shows that electrons are not pointlike, but rather are little spheres of
size X.  All such spheres carry the same total charge, evenly distributed
over their surface.

In this scenario it would be easy to imagine a room of size >> X, wherein
the total charge is quantized, but the charge in one half is not, because
one of the spheres is straddling the halfway surface.

Also in this scenario it would be true that charge remains quantized on a
per-particle basis (assuming the spheres are indivisible particles) but it
would not be true that flux is quantized, even for closed surfaces (because
of possible straddling).

So we need to keep straight the notion of _quantized_ versus the notion of
_pointlike_.  There are things (like the topological genus of a surface)
that are definitely quantized but definitely not pointlike.