Re: (epsilon_0 c) is the U(1) bundle metric (was: Coulomb's constant is a CGS kludge)

From: Franz Heymann (notfranz.heymann_at_btopenworld.com)
Date: 03/02/05 

Date: Wed, 2 Mar 2005 17:51:41 +0000 (UTC)

> whopkins@csd.uwm.edu:

[snip]

> Charges will
>always become screened in such a way that E remains finite. This, in
>effect, was the earliest formulation of a renormalization theory -- a
>classical variant of the one adopted in QED in the 1940's. It's why
>there are no infinities present in Maxwell's form of electrodynamic
>theory (rather, it's a product of the later assumption by Lorentz
that
>the relation D = epsilon_0 E holds even at the microscopic level even
>in the presence of point sources -- as it most certainly cannot
>(otherwise D.E would become ill-defined, as the square of a delta
>function)).

That paragraph was preposterous nonsense.
Maxwell's theory does not deal with point charges as sources of
electric fields *at all*. Everything is handled purely in terms of
continuous distributions of charge.
The concept of point charges as being responsible for ES fields only
arose roughly 30 years later as a result of the work of Thompson.

[snip] 

-- 
Franz
"The great tragedy of science -- the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis
by an ugly fact."
T.H. Huxley

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