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To: Cold Heat; Mark Felton
I don't know what gives you guys the idea that "we don't understand" electromagnetism. The quantum theory of electromagnetism was in hand in the 1940's. The successor theory, which shows how it morphs into the weak nuclear force at high enough energies, was in hand in the 1960's; experiment only caught up to it in the 1980's. Theory and experiment agree to something like thirteen decimal places, and the same theory works quantitatively over an astonishing range of scales, from femtometers to tens of billions of light years.

Of course we understand things like magnetism, repulsion, and the flow of current around a wire. That understanding goes back more like 100 years.

Do we think the current theory is the final theory? No, but the corrections we gain from unification with the strong and/or gravitational forces will be so exquisitely subtle that they will be experimentally unmeasurable at any naturally occurring energy scale. In other words, the current theory will give numerically correct results for all natural occurrences.

It is widely considered that the modern theory of electromagnetism is the most perfect theory of anything ever constructed by the mind of man. There is simply no scientific subject that is more completely and correctly understood.

58 posted on 08/21/2006 9:56:10 PM PDT by Physicist
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To: Physicist
We were discussing gravity really...It was i that brought up electro magnetics by bringing up motors.

yes, I am aware of the theories on motors, and also some of the arguments.

I got into a lot of that stuff when I was maintaining some electric cranes that use DC Mag Amp systems essentially based on loosely on submarine drive controls and coupled with AC motors....

The argument were over the Fields and how they were able to modify the AC waveforms to control the motor speeds and torque.

At the time, we really did not have all the answers on how the interactions worked, but they did. Fun to argue at times...

And then there is the hole theory with silicon transistors. Something we have used for 70 or more years, yet the theorists were still arguing whether the electron came out of the hole or went into it, or something to that effect.....LOL... it is just anecdotal to understanding gravity.

Anyway, my primary questions are focused on gravity and mass and all that it entails, and not electromagnetism, which we understand well as you said, yet in some areas of the physics, we still have heated arguments, or at least did about 8 years ago when I retired.

What we do know, is that we don't know a lot, and new questions are arising frequently.

61 posted on 08/21/2006 10:15:13 PM PDT by Cold Heat
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Placemarker


69 posted on 08/21/2006 11:30:36 PM PDT by AndrewC
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To: Physicist

Sometimes it pays to skip the first day of a science thread.


76 posted on 08/22/2006 6:26:08 AM PDT by js1138 (Well I say there are some things we don't want to know! Important things!")
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