Talk:Centrifugal force/Archive 4

message: The reason that I deleted your insertion 
"It should be noted however that when proposing this 'hydrodynamic' description (that was built upon in work published in the seminal papers 'On Faraday's Lines of Force' and 'On Physical Lines of Force') Maxwell was not intending the fluid to be thought of as real:'On Faraday's Lines of Force', reprinted: The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, Editor   
- W.D. Niven, Cambridge University Press 1890 Vol. I, p160    
-    
-    
- It is not even a hypothetical fluid which is introduced to explain actual   
- phenomena. It is merely a collection of imaginary properties which may be   
- employed for establishing certain theorems in pure mathematics in a way   
- more intelligible to many minds and more applicable to physical problems   
- than that in which algebraic symbols alone are used.   
-  "
was because the web link for Maxwell's 1861 paper 'On Physical Lines of Force' was made available for anybody to read. Anybody reading part I of this paper would know that Maxwell believed absolutely in the reality of the fluid aethereal medium. To say otherwise is a total misrepresentation of the truth. You then finished with a quote but didn't tell us who made the quote.
Maxwell was quite clear on the fact that a sea of aethereal vortices exists and that these vortices must be surrounded by electrical particles. If these vortices aren't real, and yet they explain the mechanics of magnetism, then what are they? Why would they be any less real than the elements of the periodic table? David Tombe 7th February 2007 (202.69.162.228 18:34, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I went further than that and removed the entire section. To the best of my comprehension it tried to argue that the fact that Maxwell had an ether-dynamic interpretation of electrodynamics somehow implies that one must consider centrifugal force a fundamental force (except that it muddled the concept further by speaking about "real" forces, a word with a host of varying possible meanings) – a conclusion that mainstream physics unanimously rejects. In order for an argument otherwise to be relevant Wikipedia material, the very least we can accept is a solid citation showing that such an argument has been made in a respected peer-reviewed professional journal. (I might add that the major schism among editors of this article appears to be whether the "reactive" or the "fictitious" meaning of "centrifugal" is the most important, but neither of the camps would accept either of the concepts as describing a fundamental force). Henning Makholm 22:40, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Oops, I misread the conclusion of the deleted section; one of the negations must have slipped me. My apologies for misrepresenting it. I still think that the section was confusing, of doubtful relevance and definitely out of place as early in the article as I found it, so I'll not self-revert – but if it were to be rewritten with a clearer emphasis about what the story can tell us about the centrifugal force concept and less emphasis on what Maxwell personally believed (or didn't) about the physical nature of the electromagnetic field, I might not be opposed to having it appear later in the article, after the basic concepts have been well presented. (This is not meant to contradict the WP:NOR policy, so proper sourcing would still be necessary). Henning Makholm 22:58, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

text: Two points. I did reference my quote as being from 'On Faraday's lines of Force' by Maxwell himself, Maxwell also refers the reader to this paper in 'On Physical Lines of Force'. Secondly Maxwell dropped this mechanical explanation in favour of a field description in 'A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field' (A move towards Field descriptions is his real legacy), so I wonder how much he did believe it? What he did or did not believe is not for us to say, I was just illustrating that the point wasn't as clear cut as made out. 
It doesn't surprise me that the quote was actually from the 1855 paper "On Faraday's Lines of Force". In the 1861 paper "On Physical lines of Force", Maxwell does indeed refer to this 1855 paper and the fact that the mechanical illustrations in it were designed to assist the imagination and not to accont for phenomena. He immediately goes on to say that he now proposes to examine magnetism from a mechanical point of view.
So what you have done is to take a quote from an 1855 paper about an imaginary phenomenon, and apply that quote as if it were referring to a real phenomenon in another 1861 paper. You basically tried to undermine the reality of centrifugal force in Maxwell's 1861 paper by using an 1855 quote totally out of context.
On your other point, it's true that Maxwell didn't continue with the vortex sea in his later papers. That doesn't mean that he had dropped the idea. He actually gives his reasons towards the end of the 1861 paper, and those reasons were to do with the fact that he couldn't get a focused picture of how the idle wheels would actually relate to the vortices. He made it clear that his proposition was not the focused picture, but that it was almost certainly heading in the dircetion of the focused picture. 
In his 1864 paper, he began to concentrate exclusively on a dynamical approach and he avoided any mention of the vortex sea. He did nevertheless state his unequivocal belief that a dielectric medium existed for the purposes of electric and magnetic phenomena, and he held this belief until his death.
We shouldn't discount the hydrodynamics used by Maxwell in his 1861 paper, and which involved centrifugal force and also lead to the Coriolis force, simply on the grounds of a quote about another matter in an 1855 paper, or because Maxwell didn't progress with his vortex cell model. 2/13/07 (203.115.188.254 10:57, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Maxwell on Real Centrifugal Force 

message: Hi Edward. I was reading a little bit about your background and I see that General Relativity is your speciality. This means that you would be well into debates on topics like inertia and the equivalence between gravitational mass and inertial mass. At the moment however, I would prefer to concentrate on the issue regarding whether or not inertia is actual relevant in centrifugal force, irrespective of what inertia actually is, or how it could be relevant.
I can already see that you are influenced by the Newtonian concept that a body continues in a straight line unless acted upon by a force. I certainly don't disagree with this fact.
However I don't adopt the Newtonian concept that this motion is explained by inertia. I adopt an attitude more akin to that of Einstein, but without the special relativity. I see space itself as determining the motion of particles. Just like Boscovich, I believe that it can all be explained kinematically without any involvement of force or inertial mass. However, I'm satisfied enough with Newton's definition of force and mass but I don't think that they are necessary when analyzing planetary orbital motion.
From what I can see, mutual tangential speed leads to radial repulsion and that is a geometrical fact. Inertia doesn't come into it. David Tombe 10th February 2007 (203.87.176.3 06:59, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: You have just established in totally unmistakable terms that your work is orginal research!!!  I don't promote my original research in the Wikipedia article space, and I am not about to let you do so either. --EMS | Talk 03:33, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inertia