Farsight's erroneous notions are the result of his apparently prolific but naïve reading about physics. To his credit, he demonstrates a genuine passion for the subject. But that is where the credit ends.
Unfortunately, all his reading and internet plodding cannot compensate for his lack of studying the real thing including the mathematics which is the only way the essence modern physics can be described and understood.
This naively intuitive reading of physics papers and books is the approach we see from so many of the crackpots that come and go from this forum. I have often wondered if these people would take the time to master the math required, might they see the light?
Probably not. Simple ignorance, by itself, does not explain stubborn advocacy of crackpot physics. A crackpot's stubborn conviction that he understands the science better than those who have devoted their lives to advancing that science allows the crackpot to reject genuine physics even after errors in their crackpot physics have been identified and explained to them.
I also doubt whether you can credit
Farsight (for example) with having done much reading. Although
Farsight has been quoting John David Jackson's
Classical Electrodynamics "forever", that textbook is full of mathematics, and it's highly unlikely that
Farsight has been able to read it. I doubt whether he even owns a copy. I suspect he found the prooftext he's been citing "forever" by Googling:
Geddoutofit, lpetrich. It's no religious revelation to point out that the field concerned is the electromagnetic field, or that certain people cling to ignorance and misunderstanding. For example on
this website the author says "Magnetic Field Generated by a Single Current-Carrying Rod". It isn't really a field, and it isn't really generated. I'm forever pointing this sort of thing out. I've previously referred to section 11.10 of Jackson's
Classical Electrodynamics where he says
"one should properly speak of the electromagnetic field Fuv rather than E or B separately".
If
Farsight had actually read Jackson's book, he'd have noticed that section I.1, at the very beginning of the book, begins with these equations:
John David Jackson said:
The equations governing electromagnetic phenomena are the Maxwell equations,
∇∙D = ρ
∇×H - ∂D/∂t = J
∇×E + ∂B/∂t = 0
∇∙B = 0
where for external sources in vacuum,
D = ε
0E and
B = μ
0H.
That is, of course, the standard undergraduate-level vector version of Maxwell's equations in differential form.
Despite
Farsight's frequent citation of Jackson as an authority,
Farsight condemns Jackson's vector formulation of Maxwell's equations:
The problem with the Heaviside's vector version is that it leads to people like Clinger believing in a cargo-cult version of electromagnetism wherein the forces that result from electromagnetic field interactions are themselves fields. They aren't. Maxwell unified the electric and magnetic fields into the electromagnetic field. But when you read Clinger talking about electromagnetism, and it's as if Maxwell had never been born.
Farsight was unaware that Jackson refers to
B and
H as magnetic fields. Those symbols occur throughout Jackson's book, and every occurrence of those symbols refers to a magnetic field.
Farsight remains unaware of this even though
I pointed it out just two days ago.
So
Farsight's been quoting Jackson without reading Jackson, and he's been ignoring Jackson's words even when I highlighted those words for him.
If those who advocate crackpot physics were sincerely interested in learning physics, they'd pay more attention when their mistakes are explained to them.
I don't. In fact, when you pay attention to the distinction between field and force and to Heaviside's gravitomagnetism, you understand why he was able to work it out from electromagnetism. Go and look at some pictures of
vector fields.
Crackpots like pictures, partly because they can look at pictures without understanding the relevant math, and partly because they can pretend pictures support their crackpot physics. Some of the vector fields found by that Google Images search are pictures of magnetic fields, whose existence
Farsight is denying.
Why would someone direct our attention to pictures of the vector fields he denies? Because
Farsight himself doesn't know what magnetic fields look like, and has only the foggiest understanding of basic vector math.
When
Farsight sees pictures of magnetic fields that have been generated directly from solutions of Maxwell's equations, as at the
web page Farsight cited, he doesn't recognize them as magnetic fields.
He doesn't even recognize them as vector fields.
See the post above. I'm not ignorant. Now am I?
Those who advocate crackpot physics often cite their own error-infested posts as evidence of their understanding.
!
