The Old Productive Research Programs Refuse to Die
The Replacement of Continental Physics in the 19th Century, Part 3
On March 3rd, I gave a talk to the Rising Tide Foundation entitled “The Replacement of Continental Physics in the 19th Century”. This post is the last of three corresponding to an edited version of the transcript of that talk. The first post was entitled Two Productive Research Programs in the Early 19th Century, and the second post was entitled How Two Productive Research Programs Were Consciously Thrown Out.
The Resistance
Not everyone was happy with the replacement of the old ideas with the new ones introduced by the British empiricists. So let us look at some aspects of resistance. First, André-Marie Ampère himself, in 1823. This is after the discoveries by Ørsted. Ampère recognized instantly that the people who were talking about what would be called later the magnetic field were reviving Cartesian physics, i.e., they were reviving the vortices. So let us read:
By seeing the planets revolving around the Sun, Cartesian physics imagines that they are pushed in the sense in which they move by vortices revolving in the same sense; when it [the Cartesian physics] sees a pole of a magnet carried to the right and the other [pole carried] to the left of a conducting wire, it supposes a vortex independent of the wire. Newtonian physics explains all celestial phenomena by an attraction directed along the straight line connecting the two interacting particles and the motion is a complicated result of this attraction. As regards the new [electromagnetic and electrodynamic] phenomena I make what Newton has done for celestial motions, [namely,] I explain them by attractive and repulsive forces.
André-Marie Ampère, 18231
That was Ampère, already in 1823. He was calling them out. He criticized Faraday explicitly for violating Newton’s Third Law.
Almost a century later, we look at Jules Henri Poincaré (1854-1912), who was a brilliant mathematician. In mathematics, there so many different results and principles associated with Poincaré. He was the first one to write about relativity. Many people say that Einstein plagiarized him, but did not quite get the math right. But that is a different story, that is another talk or another set of talks. Well what did Poincaré write about Maxwell?
For a mind accustomed to admiring [the models of people like Laplace or Cauchy], a theory is not easily satisfactory. [In other words to satisfy people who are used to reading wonderful models, you need to do serious work. It is hard.] Not only will he not tolerate the slightest appearance of contradiction, but he will demand that the various parts be logically linked together and that the number of hypotheses be reduced to a minimum. [This is very different from the language that the British empiricists and their German allies are using. The whole thing has to fit together.] [...]
The English scientist does not seek to build a single, definitive and well-ordered edifice; rather, he seems to be erecting a large number of provisional and independent constructions, between which communication is difficult and sometimes impossible.
Henri Poincaré, 1890 [my translation]2
In other words, the different aspects of physics have now been separated into different components, and there is no possibility of creating a well-ordered whole.
Now Poincaré was pulling his punches, i.e., he was being polite. But his colleague Pierre Duhem, who was both a theoretical physicist and historian of science, and who wrote extensively on medieval and pre-Galilean science, and opposed Einstein, had different words for James Clerk Maxwell. Let us read him:
At every moment, between the best established and most universally accepted laws of electricity and magnetism, and the equations imposed by algebraic analogy or mechanical interpretation, the disagreement bursts forth; at every moment, it seems that the very sequence of his reasoning and calculations will lead Maxwell to an impossibility, to a contradiction. But just as the contradiction is about to become clear, just as the impossibility is about to become obvious, Maxwell makes a troublesome term disappear, changes an unacceptable sign [i.e., plus to minus or minus to plus], transforms the meaning of a letter; then, having taken the dangerous step, the new electrical theory, enriched by a paralogism, continues its deductions.
Pierre Duhem, 1902 [my translation]3
I mean, this is scathing, this is truly scathing criticism, essentially saying that James Clerk Maxwell is a fraud. I was truly astonished when I came across this quotation. These are serious words.
Let us move to today’s world. So, let us consider the late Peter Graneau, who was Professor at MIT, and his son Neil Graneau, I am not sure what exactly his position was, but he worked at the University of Oxford. Each was a brilliant researcher, and they also had a longstanding collaboration, father-and-son pair, and they conducted many, many experiments in support of Ampère, but they were also vocal supporters of Ernst Mach and held the most absolute vision of the action-at-a-distance idea. For them, all matter instantaneously senses all other matter in the universe.
It was already demonstrated by Pierre-Simon Laplace in the 18th century, that for gravity to work and the solar system to remain stable, gravity has to be moving at least 10 billion times as fast as the speed of light. Similar calculations were done by Tom van Flandern in the late 20th century: unimaginable speeds are necessary for gravity to work, in other words there is no speed limit of 3x10⁸ m/s that we are told comes from relativity, from Einstein. So Peter and Neil Graneau were clearly pushing in favour of Ampère and in favour of Ernst Mach. Here are the titles of some of their books:
Here is a quote from Neil Graneau, in his eulogy for his father, about field theory:
Maxwell in the 1870s was on a self-proclaimed mission to develop a field theory specifically to introduce an undetectable substance that inhabited the space between all pieces of matter with as many properties as required to explain all known experiments. [That is similar to Duhem and this idea that, yeah, we are just going to invent all the properties needed to correspond to whatever we have seen in the experiment. So this sounds very much like Bošković.] For no reason, other than fashion, this new field theory approach became popular in England and within 20 years had pervaded continental Europe and the rest of the scientific world and the IAAAD [Instantaneous Action at a Distance] era came to an end.
Neal Graneau, 20144
Who is next? André Koch Torres Assis (1962-). He co-wrote papers with Peter Graneau, and I think with Neal Graneau as well. He has spent his life reviving the work of Wilhelm Eduard Weber. He has organized translations of Coulomb, Ampère and Weber into English. He revived Weberian electrodynamics, as well as Mach’s principle, as did the Graneaus. He invented his own relational mechanics, which puts all of this together. This would also be worthy of another talk and many blog posts to come.
So here are some books that have been published by André Assis: the translations of Coulomb and Ampère, four volumes of Weber, there is a fifth one coming out. Assis has also written explicitly himself about Weberian electrodynamics. Unfortunately the left book is incredibly expensive, and the next one I cannot find on the Internet, not even as a used copy.
And finally, I came across a PhD thesis published in September 2022 at the University of Liverpool, Aspects of Weberian Electrodynamics. The external examiner was Neal Graneau himself. The author is Christof Baumgärtel. Reading it, there are many interesting leads, including talking about the relationship between plasma physics and Weberian electrodynamics, and so on and so forth.
The point is that the resistance is there, and it is growing. Has it taken over all the science? No, of course not, by no means. However, there clearly are people who keep coming back to the ideas and say, They are worth looking at.
Conclusions
So it is time for some kind of conclusion.
First, there is a renewal of interest in the work of André-Marie Ampère and Wilhelm Eduard Weber. Second, Newton’s Third Law is crucial. Already in 1822, Ampère wrote to Faraday directly, stating that the latter’s lines of force were violating the law.
As for Helmholtz’s claim that Weber’s force law did not conserve energy, the primary line of attack by Thomson and Helmholtz against Weber, the claim was disproven by Caluzzi and Assis in 1996. This disproof was crucial, clearly demonstrating that the accusation was spurious: it was simply wrong.
So the question comes back to the very beginning of the talk, where I presented two successful research programs, one talking about the properties of light and the other talking about the properties of electricity. What is the relationship between the two?
Furthermore, it is now understood that most of the matter in the universe is in the form of plasma. So what would plasma physics look like from a Weberian perspective? When one is talking about plasma, one continually refers to Birkeland currents, which consist of twisted pairs of electric currents, crushed together by their magnetic fields. But in Weberian electrodynamics, there are no magnetic fields, but there would still be the crushing together of the two currents, then what exactly should be taking place inside a Birkeland current?
Next question: Is there a simple explanation for quantum mechanics? Well, there one of my subscribers, his name is Hans G. Schantz (@aetherczar), and he is writing a book right now about the relationship between electrodynamics and quantum mechanics; he claims that quantum mechanics can be understood deterministically using the pilot waves proposed by de Broglie.
It may well be that all of this stuff can hold together, but someone has to do the work, or many people have to do the work.
But I have another interesting thought. I came across something else from the glory days of the early École Polytechnique. It turns out that heat death was promoted by all of the people participating in the anti-Weber movement: William Thompson, Hermann von Helmholtz, Rudolph Clausius, Ludwig Boltzmann. So I have a question: Did the work of Lazare and Sadi Carnot, another father-and-son pair, on thermodynamics suffer the same treatment as did the work of Fresnel and Ampère? Because Sadi Carnot was accused by no less than William Thompson of having violated the principle of conservation of energy. Oh, that sounds familiar, that is exactly what they accused Weber of having done.
So my conclusion for today is, there are so many contradictions in theoretical physics today that we need to recheck and redo absolutely everything since the glory days of the École Polytechnique. Everything needs to be rethought, restudied, reunderstood, reconfirmed. New experiments need to be done to distinguish the subtleties between different theories, and so on and so on and so forth.
The debate continues. Science is not reaching an end-point. It never will.
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André-Marie Ampère. Letter addressed to Paul Erman, dated 9 August 1823. Cited in A.K.T. Assis and J.P.M.C. Chaib. Ampère’s Electrodynamics. Montreal, Apeiron, 2015. p.258.
H. Poincaré, Comptes Rendus, t.CXVI, p.1020, 1893. Cited in Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem. Les Théories Électriques de J. Clerk Maxwell: Étude Historique et Critique. Retyped edition, no publisher, 3 July 2014, pp.10-11.
Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem. Les Théories Électriques de J. Clerk Maxwell: Étude Historique et Critique. Retyped edition, 3 July 2014, pp.9-10.
Dr. Neal Graneau. The Scientific Legacy of Dr. Peter Graneau: Instantaneous Interconnection of All Things. Infinite Energy 114:10-15, 2014.
Thanks for the shout out. And thanks for making me better aware of the broader community working on tackling these challenging problems and uncovering nature's mysteries.