On Jun 17, 1:33 pm, Igor wrote:
On Jun 17, 10:50 am, Edward Green wrote:

In this scheme is there implicitly a local propagation vector --
something like a fluid velocity -- built into the one dimensional
case, which also doens't count?

Particles in one dimension would have no choice but to be polarized
longitudinally, if that's what you asking. So massless gauge
particles in one dimension would probably make no sense, but then
restricting things to just one dimension is usually begging for
problems to begin with. Interesting physics doesn't usually result
until you talk about two of them.

Poor phrasing. I should have said "degrees of freedom".

I was noting that if we roughly said the electromagnetic field had two
degrees of freedom, then we are apparently regarding k as a given. I
was wondering is something similar were implicit in a "scalar field".