On Feb 7, 2:06 pm, Timo Nieminen wrote:
On Thu, 7 Feb 2008, Eric Gisse wrote:
On Feb 7, 1:23 pm, Timo Nieminen wrote:
On Thu, 7 Feb 2008, Eric Gisse wrote:
On Feb 7, 4:28 am, wrote:

The point is that Maxwell's theory can be seamlessly expanded,
contrary to belief, from a disregarded de Broglie hypothesis,
to directly describe localized photons and by linking it with
classical Newton, to also describe localized massive particles,
moving or not.

No, it can't. Maxwell's equations are incompatible with all of quantum
theory.

I wouldn't go so far, since the Maxwell equations are the foundation of
QED (the modes that QED photons are the quantised excitations of are
solutions of the Maxwell equations, in the form of divergence-free
solutions of the vector Helmholtz equation).

I'll forgive myself for not knowing QED.

Neat, though.

QED books can be really good sources for relativistic and Lagrangian
formulations of classical electrodynamics, conservation laws via
Noether's theorem, and so on. It's the foundation for the rest, so the
good books treat it carefully and precisely, but compactly enough so that
it doesn't take up too much space. I especially like Jauch & Rohrlich,
Photons and electrons, 2nd ed, in this regard. Some nice bits in
Cohen-Tannoudji, too. (I don't mean to imply that these would be easy
reading!)

Argh. TOO BUSY. Too much stuff to build and general "things to do".

I'm not _especially_ interested in QED anyway, though QFT would be
worth my time given my interest in things like the Casimir effect.

I might look at them some time when I have the time and inclination.
Thanks for the suggestions.


Bad QED books, OTOH, can be really bad sources, with oversimplified,
sloppy, gappy coverage.

--
Timo Nieminen - Home page:http://www.physics.uq.edu.au/people/nieminen/
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