[FRIAM] This makes me think of this list...

[Jon Zingale]

Eric,

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I have always felt like a physics
tourist, even in my earlier days as a fly-on-the-wall in Dan Freed's TQFT
seminars in the RLM building. I couldn't agree more about Purcell, and I
still have my mom's copy from when I was a kid. Rasmus has loaned me
Jackson on a number of occasions and one of these days I hope to get into
the exercises like I do with other texts. If in what follows I am
completely off base, I am happy to learn something.

That said, I don't feel competent to validate Angela Collier's exposition
in the video I referenced, but there is something I thought generalized
well to the discussion. The confusion, as she outlines it, does not appear
to be the existence of the Lorentz force law, but its consequence in a
theory without intrinsic magnetic dipoles. Griffith seems to express (in an
interview Angela managed to track down) that (from his perspective) there
is no place in classical electrodynamics for the notion of an intrinsic
magnetic dipole because spin doesn't belong to the classical theory. He
seems to accept that by slight generalization of the theory, by extending a
term, one does get a coherent theory. Of course this is the kind of
pedantry only a father could love. This is in-part what I read in your
stating,

"The issue of formal systems, and their role in bringing into being habits
of thought that, later, we wrongly suppose to be “natural attitudes”

Still, I think pausing for a moment on Griffith's take speaks to the
formalization discussion well, and was in-part inspired by your earlier
discussion with Nick regarding the inheritance of properties to ensembles
from properties of individuals:

"Curie and Weiss took a certain essentialist position w.r.t. the dipolarity
of magnetization.  That there can be magnetization on the macroscale
because there was already-realized magnetization at the microscale."

A continuing interest I have is how one theory derives as a theorem what
another theory states as an axiom. While theories of physics such as QFTs
seem to begin with assumptions of spacetime and fields as fundamental,
others such as Carroll (via Everett) seek to derive the geometry of
spacetime from the information theoretic arguments and the Shrodinger
equation. When modeled, both have their own bizarre and cursed
consequences. Yet I hope that at the end of the day, the various approaches
will provide models of physics indistinguishable to farmers in our time and
perhaps any other.

Jon
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