Zero Point Energy doc
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| Z ERO P OINT E NERGY (1) Clerk Maxwell created for the first time afield theory which was independently testable against Newtonian force theories. He created a situation in which the dominance of Newtonian mechanics over the whole spectrum of physical science was called into question and decisive steps were taken in the direction of a non-mechanical thoroughly relational understanding of the intelligible connections immanent in the universe. No doubt Clerk Maxwell did not realise the far-reaching implications of his work which was to change the basic perspective and direction of physical science and alter our understanding of the world of space and time. With reference to Clerk Maxwell's two basic papers, On Physical Lines of Force and A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field, Ivan Tolstoy has recently given us the following appraisal. 'For us, with our hundred or so years of perspective, these two papers - Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism - area turning point in the history of science. The theory is, first of all a synthesis - one of the greatest in the history of science. It unifies two kinds of force - the electric and the magnetic - under one the electromagnetic field. This unification was the direct, logical consequence of Faraday's experimental work it had a been begun by others -Ampere, Weber, W. Thomson. But Maxwell crystallized this, the first of the modern unified field theories and gave it the mathematical form which remains immortal under the name of Maxwell's equations - a system of relationships between changing electric and magnetic fields - a whole universe of electromagnetic phenomena, miraculously contained in a few lines of elegant mathematics. (2) Clerk Maxwell's work was of profound conceptual importance for it had the effect of reorganising the epistemological and logical substructure of physical science, not only through his determination of the mathematical properties of radiation which has had immense implications for scientific technology, but through the way in which he conceived and developed the nature of the field and established the reality of the field as the underlying reality of all spatio-temporal phenomena. At this point we cannot do better than let Einstein himself speak. The formulation of these equations is the most important event in physics since Newton's time, not only because of their wealth of content, but also because they form a pattern fora new type of law. The characteristic features of Maxwell's equations, appearing in all other equations of modern physics, are summarized in one sentence. Maxwell's equations are laws representing the structure of the field. All space is the scene of these laws and not, as for mechanical laws, only points in which matter or charges are present. Moreover, it should be pointed out, that since the epistemological form of Clerk Maxwell's general equations does not depend on the way in which the observer, or the person who measures the fields, is moving, they have the |