Recent content by coquelicot

This seems interesting. I sent you a direct message to your inbox, as this kind of discussion usually leads to non main-stream consequences prohibited in this forum.

Thank you so many for these references. I was unaware of them. Regarding the paper of U. Backhaus and K. Schäfer, it can be read online (here), and as far as I understood, their authors think (and justify) that the arguments against the "non uniqueness" of the Poynting vector are not decisive. I...

Yes, but it depends on what you call "justified". The fact that an equation is derived from a well established theory certainly means it is true. But the equation remains true even after one adds a curl to S, as you pointed out. So, formally speaking, one is not allowed to decide arbitrarily...

Thank you again for this very insightfull answer. I now understand that the "proof" of Jackson for the form of the Poynting vector is of the form: "You have an equation (the Poynting theorem) that is deduced from the EST. You can see in this equation an energy density like term, hence its exact...

Thank you for your answer. I would appreciate something more detailed though, as I am not that good at GR.

The Poynting vector is a definition, that is supposed to represent the energy flow at each point. Unfortunately, the only observable effect caused by the Poynting vector is through the energy variation in a volume subject to an energy flux through its surface, that is, the Poynting theorem. As...

I apology for not being able to answer to further posts. I have to travel and will probably be too busy during the next weeks. Hope this thread will continue though.

I will not enter into the discussion of the type "who are the best, mathematicians of physicists". That's ridiculous for me. It is evident that professional physicists, who are often excellent mathematicians too, and who deal with physics full time, contribute more to physics than mathematicians...

(liked it). You may be right after all, maybe I should consider Vanadium50 is not representative for the physics, a quantum jump in some sense. But that's your fault, you wrote above "Can be read as today’s physics manifesto". ;-)

So, let ban Galileo, Pascal, Descartes, Fermat, Euler, Lagrange, Legendre, Gauss, Jacobi, Cauchy, Riemann, Levy-civita, Lie, Von Neuman, Noether, and all the other useless crackpots from the physics. Oh, I forgot to ban Newton, who was primarily a mathematician and a teacher of mathematics at...

Thank you for agreeing with me that mathematicians tend to write books in physics more rigorously than physicists, and tend to reject mathematically incoherent theories. In mathematics, we call this "q.e.d." (quod erat demonstrandum).

I've read the article of Griffiths. Thank you so many, very interesting (it also provides all the relevant derivation of the formulae in one place.

Actually, that's not the same book(s), and my question is much wider. You can see it as an example of what real problems a real mathematician can somewhat worry about, if you wish.

Actually, there are many other articles, and the book of Babin and Figotin cited in this thread and elsewhere is another view. But what is the main stream? And you have another book that processes the subject in a very particular and (probably) interesting manner: F.W Hehl, Y.L. Obukhov...

Sorry, you are probably right. If my memory is exact, Robinson criticizes the whole work of de Groot from 1950 (you can imagine that the book of de Groot has not pop up from nowhere).