Charge conservation and special relativity

[Ahmed1029]

If conservation of charge gets violated in future experiments, what would be the implications on relativity? I have some faint idea that this will cause photons to have non-zero rest mass, but does this affect special relativity at all? Also, does special relativity make conservation of charge necessary?

 

[berkeman]

I have some faint idea that this will cause photons to have non-zero rest mass

Do you have a valid reference that suggest this? Or is it personal speculation...?

 

[Ahmed1029]

Do you have a valid reference that suggest this? Or is it personal speculation...?

No, a physics professor told me so but I'm not so sure.

 

[Ahmed1029]

Do you have a valid reference that suggest this? Or is it personal speculation...?

I'm mainly curious whether SR necessitates that charge is conserved.

 

[berkeman]

No, a physics professor told me so but I'm not so sure.

But you are not in school; you are self-studying. Where did you happen to have a technical discussion with a university physics professor?

I'm learning physics on my own.

 

[Ahmed1029]

But you are not in school; you are self-studying. Where did you happen to have a technical discussion with a university physics professor?

A website just like this one

 

[Ahmed1029]

But you are not in school; you are self-studying. Where did you happen to have a technical discussion with a university physics professor?

Also as an aside, I'm actually in school; I'm a medical student but physics is my side gig, so I can visit other departments if I want to. I however found the internet more helpful.

 

[PeterDonis]

I'm mainly curious whether SR necessitates that charge is conserved.

SR in itself is not a theory of electromagnetism, so this question is unanswerable.

Our best current classical theory of electromagnetism is Maxwell electrodynamics, and our best current quantum theory of electromagnetism is QED, and both of those theories predict that charge is conserved. So those theories would have to be modified if charge conservation were found to be violated. Whether the resulting theories would still obey Lorentz invariance is a separate question that could only be answered if experiment forced us to develop such modified theories.

 

[Ibix]

Worth noting that you can modify electromagnetic theory so that light does not travel at $c$, which corresponds to massive photons in the quantised theory. This would have no effect on relativity except that we wouldn't be able to call the constant $c$ "the speed of light" any more. And we'd have to re-write textbooks to always derive the theory without using light signals. So all bureaucracy, really, no actual physics change to relativity (electromagnetic theory would have changed, of course).

As far as I know charge is still conserved in this theory.

 

[Nugatory]

This thread is closed.