Cyan comments on Open Thread: March 2010 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: AdeleneDawner 01 March 2010 09:25AM

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Comment author: wnoise 04 March 2010 01:57:21AM *  2 points [-]

I generally prefer links to papers on the arxiv go the abstract, as so: http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.4218

This lets us read the abstract, and easily get to other versions of the same paper (including the latest, if some time goes by between your posting and my reading), and get to other works by the same author.

EDIT: overall, reasonable points, but some things "pinging" my crank-detectors. I suppose I'll have to track down reference 10 and the 4/3 claim for electro-magnetic mass.

Comment author: Cyan 04 March 2010 02:43:30AM *  2 points [-]

the 4/3 claim for electro-magnetic mass

Wikipedia points to the original text of a 1905 article by Poincaré. How's your French?

Comment author: wnoise 04 March 2010 03:02:43AM 2 points [-]

Thanks. It's decent, actually, but there's still some barrier. Increasing that barrier is changes to physics notation since then (no vectors!).

Fortunately my university library appears to have a copy of an older edition of Rohrlich's Classical Charged Particles, which may help piece things together.

Comment author: Cyan 04 March 2010 03:26:46AM *  2 points [-]

Petkov wrote:

Feynman [wrote], ”It is therefore impossible to get all the mass to be electromagnetic in the way we hoped. It is not a legal theory if we have nothing but electrodynamics” [13, p. 28-4]; but he was unaware that the factor of 4/3 had already been accounted for [10]).

It's worth noting that Feynman's statements are actually correct. According to Wikipedia, the problem is solved by postulating a non-electromagnetic attractive force holding the charged particle together, which subtracts 1/3 of the 4/3 factor, leaving unity. Petkov doesn't explicitly say that Feynman is wrong, but his phrasing might leave that impression.

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