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Acknowledge the three versions to "Groupthink and the blunder of the gauges"
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James Bowery
James Bowery
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Paul J. Cote and Mark A. Johnson of Benet Laboratories, Army Research, Engineering and Development Command wrote a series of short papers on the vector potential arising from their attempts to solve engineering problems with railguns. One of those papers titled "Groupthink and the blunder of the gauges" has, as one of its conclusions, the provocative claim:

a. The dynamic form of Gauss' law contains the hidden law of physics $$\nabla\cdot E_I = (\partial^2\varphi_c/\partial t^2)/c^2$$ This is one of the universal laws of electromagnetism and is needed to supplement Faraday's law of induction in order to permit a full definition of $$E_I$$ It can be viewed as a missing Maxwell equation.

Where $$E_I$$ is the induced electric field.

I've found only one critique -- an anonymous critique at that -- of this and it seems to be a critique of the entire series of papers by Cote and Johnson on the grounds that they misunderstood the subtleties of gauge invariance.

Is this critique valid?

Does the third version of "Groupthink and the blunder of the gauges" render the critique invalid?

Paul J. Cote and Mark A. Johnson of Benet Laboratories, Army Research, Engineering and Development Command wrote a series of short papers on the vector potential arising from their attempts to solve engineering problems with railguns. One of those papers titled "Groupthink and the blunder of the gauges" has, as one of its conclusions, the provocative claim:

a. The dynamic form of Gauss' law contains the hidden law of physics $$\nabla\cdot E_I = (\partial^2\varphi_c/\partial t^2)/c^2$$ This is one of the universal laws of electromagnetism and is needed to supplement Faraday's law of induction in order to permit a full definition of $$E_I$$ It can be viewed as a missing Maxwell equation.

Where $$E_I$$ is the induced electric field.

I've found only one critique -- an anonymous critique at that -- of this and it seems to be a critique of the entire series of papers by Cote and Johnson on the grounds that they misunderstood the subtleties of gauge invariance.

Is this critique valid?

Paul J. Cote and Mark A. Johnson of Benet Laboratories, Army Research, Engineering and Development Command wrote a series of short papers on the vector potential arising from their attempts to solve engineering problems with railguns. One of those papers titled "Groupthink and the blunder of the gauges" has, as one of its conclusions, the provocative claim:

a. The dynamic form of Gauss' law contains the hidden law of physics $$\nabla\cdot E_I = (\partial^2\varphi_c/\partial t^2)/c^2$$ This is one of the universal laws of electromagnetism and is needed to supplement Faraday's law of induction in order to permit a full definition of $$E_I$$ It can be viewed as a missing Maxwell equation.

Where $$E_I$$ is the induced electric field.

I've found only one critique -- an anonymous critique at that -- of this and it seems to be a critique of the entire series of papers by Cote and Johnson on the grounds that they misunderstood the subtleties of gauge invariance.

Is this critique valid?

Does the third version of "Groupthink and the blunder of the gauges" render the critique invalid?

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James Bowery
James Bowery
  • 1.4k
  • 8
  • 23

Railguns and Gauge Invariance

Paul J. Cote and Mark A. Johnson of Benet Laboratories, Army Research, Engineering and Development Command wrote a series of short papers on the vector potential arising from their attempts to solve engineering problems with railguns. One of those papers titled "Groupthink and the blunder of the gauges" has, as one of its conclusions, the provocative claim:

a. The dynamic form of Gauss' law contains the hidden law of physics $$\nabla\cdot E_I = (\partial^2\varphi_c/\partial t^2)/c^2$$ This is one of the universal laws of electromagnetism and is needed to supplement Faraday's law of induction in order to permit a full definition of $$E_I$$ It can be viewed as a missing Maxwell equation.

Where $$E_I$$ is the induced electric field.

I've found only one critique -- an anonymous critique at that -- of this and it seems to be a critique of the entire series of papers by Cote and Johnson on the grounds that they misunderstood the subtleties of gauge invariance.

Is this critique valid?