Recent content by rpfeifer

Thanks yoron, it's nice to see my efforts (and those of other posters, such as DaleSpam) appreciated. That's why I stuck around in this thread - in case there was someone reading it who would find my explanations useful. Best of luck with the tensors! They're not as fierce as they look. :smile:

I haven't formally set up the most general situation, evolved it, and boosted it, either, but I don't particularly feel the need to right now. Given the explicitly SR-invariant construction of the formalism, I believe the burden of proof is now on anyone who wishes to claim they have a situation...

I'm not sure how safe the description of a dielectric in terms of \epsilon and \mu is in this regime. Given that the usual description of the origin of refractive index is in terms of multiple dipole scatterings retarding the propagation of the wavefront, I'd be very careful about using this...

You're right - I was wrong in considering the possibility of SR violation. The value of p has no effect on the transformation properties of p. I got dazzled by the unphysicality of the situation (which really isn't all that relevant to this part of the issue, after all). Also, it should still...

Which is really just a paraphrase of Peter Donis' comment that this is fine for isolated systems :)

Keji - regarding your question (which was subsequently deleted) as to whether I had "banned" sciencewatch: I have no moderation powers, and I had assumed sciencewatch had voluntarily unsubscribed from the forum. I'm not sure if you were trying to insult me with the deleted comment, or whether...

Hello all! It looks like a lot of interesting things have been said on this thread since I last checked in. In particular, sciencewatch's model is now much more thoroughly described. First, though, I'd like to warn about using macroscopic EM theory to attempt to calculate momentum density...

If you don't know how to set up a rigorous model of the wave and medium, and then take limits, that's fair enough. It is good to be able to admit your limitations. This same limitation is why you are struggling with the A-M controversy. You need to learn how to set up this sort of more detailed...

Error: The situation we are discussing is more complex than those addressed in the textbooks. Approximations valid in the problems they address may not be valid here.

"Do you like having a material momentum density which contains E, H, D, and B? Does this make sense to you? Sure, it might not contribute to momentum transfer, but it doesn't describe the movement of matter any more." Just wanted to say - there's nothing wrong with such a formulation, but you...

Thanks, Dale, very elegant. Yep, you can construct a co-ordinate frame using GR in which space--time as you know it is rippling gently back and forth rather than the atoms of the medium. That would be very silly, but in a good way. (The physics would be 100% correct, and absolutely no...

"Please pay attention to the model: Suppose that there is a plane wave propagating in an isotropic, homogeneous, non-conducting, no-loss, non-dispersive, ideal medium. Observed in the medium-rest frame, the medium material momentum should be zero and the refractive index can be assumed to be...

I'll just expand on my last comment a bit. "I may have misunderstood you there: You may have wanted to discuss a system where the dielectric is initially in motion, then stops when the light pulse enters it." Total momentum is also conserved in this instance, as the momentum transferred from...

#98: Good start, much more polite, but then: "there is a mistake in your reasoning" - You're back to trying to turn this into a fight again. Oh well, it was nice while it lasted. "|ExH/c**2 in a medium| / |ExH/c**2 in vacuum| =1/n (refractive index)" Think about this. You just said the density...

Dear Prof. Veselago, Thank you for your relevant citations (the consideration of media with negative refractive indices is a particularly interesting subject). I note that you consider only the electromagnetic portion of the Abraham tensor pair, neglecting the associated material momentum...