Collective Electrodynamics: Quantum Foundations of Electromagnetism

by Carver A. Mead

Book Overview

In this book Carver Mead offers a radically new approach to the standard problems of electromagnetic theory. Motivated by the belief that the goal of scientific research should be the simplification and unification of knowledge, he describes a new way of doing electrodynamics - collective electrodynamics - that does not rely on Maxwell's equations, but rather uses the quantum nature of matter as its sole basis. Collective electrodynamics is a way...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262133784
• ISBN13: 9780262133784
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
• Length: 135 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Essence of SuperConduction

Precise, clearly written and simply stated key concepts of quantum theory as related to superconductors and its relevance for electrodynamics.

Great piece of work

I found out about this book through reading Milo Wolff's work. This book places some of Wolff's ideas into a rigorous mathematical framework. The last chapter of Collective Electrodynamics provides an amazing answer to a question that I've been wondering about for years - "How and why do quantum jumps take place?" Just for this, it was worth purchasing this book. This book and Wolff's books provide the best explanation of quantum physics that I have ever read. After reading these works, one sees that quantum physics is not mysterious and mystical at all. It is actually very reasonable.

Bohr and Heisenberg Refuted

As of today, Thanksgiving, 22November2007, there are ten reviews of this book posted. None of them, nor all of them together, is adequate. I urge prospective buyers to read the American Spectator interview with Carver Mead. The Spectator has taken down its copy, but a few are still available online. Google "Carver Mead Collective Electrodynamics Spectator Interview", withoug quotation marks. One reviewer says here that Mead's arguments against Bohr and Heisenberg were advanced during the 1930's, and were refuted. I wonder if he understands anything anyone has said. The Spectator writes, "Central to Mead's rescue project are a series of discoveries inconsistent with the prevailing conceptions of quantum mechanics. One was the laser. As late as 1956, Bohr and Von Neumann, the paragons of quantum theory, arrived at the Columbia laboratories of Charles Townes, who was in the process of describing his invention. With the transistor, the laser is one of the most important inventions of the twentieth century. Designed into every CD player and long distance telephone connection, lasers today are manufactured by the billions. At the heart of laser action is perfect alignment of the crests and troughs of myriad waves of light. Their location and momentum must be theoretically knowable. But this violates the holiest canon of Copenhagen theory: Heisenberg Uncertainty. Bohr and Von Neumann proved to be true believers in Heisenberg's rule. Both denied that the laser was possible. When Townes showed them one in operation, they retreated artfully. "In Collective Electrodynamics, Mead cites nine other experimental discoveries, from superconductive currents to masers, to Bose-Einstein condensates predicted by Einstein but not demonstrated until 1995. These discoveries of large-scale, coherent quantum phenomena all occurred after Bohr's triumph over Einstein." When all the waves of all the atoms in a system are synchronized, the system is coherent. Scientists during the 1930's were not able to synchronize the waves. When all atoms are synchronized, matter is a wave. Mead proves this by experiment. When the waves are not synchronized, they interfere with each other. Perhaps it is true, what some reviewers say here, that Mead does not really develop a complete theory of electrodynamics; but he does demonstrate conclusively from actual experiments his main contention: Bohr taught the correspondence principle, which says that as quantum numbers get large, the behavior approximates a Newtonian mechanical system. But modern experiments show that as quantum numbers get large, behavior diverges more and more from a mechanical system. What large quantum numbers develop into is an electrodynamical system. Under that paradigm, if the system is coherent, Mead has a perfect solution to Schrodinger's wave equation; and the uncertainty principle disappears.

Successor to Feyman's Red Books

From time to time I ask people if there's been anything better than Feyman's "Lectures in Physics," and the answer is generally no, that's about all there is... Seems to me this beautiful book is at least the start of the current generation's canonical physics text set.

Collective Electrodynamics--Carver Mead's book

Despite his preface upbraiding physicists for their work of the past 50-75 years, the main text makes reasonable claims based upon well-founded experimental and theoretical results. The book endorses earlier work of Einstein, Feynmann, Reimann, Lorentz, Maxwell, Planck, and others while making computational and conceptual adjustments to accommodate modern experimental results. Also in the text, Bohr and other die-hard quantum statisticians are continually under attack for their poo-pooing of possible phenomena, algorithms, and concepts behind the observed quantum behavior. Bohr and his clan, apparently, claimed that the statistics made up the whole baseball team of quantum physics--and that we should not, and could not, look further.In refuting this micro-labotomic approach of Bohr, Dr. Mead makes reference to systems--macroscopic in size--that exhibit quantum behaviors. While he mentions lasers, masers, semiconductors, superconductors, and other systems in the text, the primary results of the book hinge upon experimental results from the field of superconductors. He points out that physics can be split into several areas:Classical Mechanics explains un-coherent, uncharged systems such as cannon balls, planets, vehicles, etc.Classical Electrodynamics explains un-coherent, charged systems such as conductors, currents, and their fields.Thermodynamics explains how macroscopic statistics, such as temperature and entropy, guide the time evolution of systems.Modern Quantum Mechanics tries to explain coherent, charged systems.Here 'coherent' refers to quantum coherency, where many particles/atoms march to the same drum such as the photons in a laser, or the electrons in a superconductor, or any isolated one or two particles. Another description of coherency is that the states are quantum entangled; their time-evolution depends upon each other.The thrust of Carver's book: QM applies to all matter--not just small systems or isolated particles--is well made. He brings up experimental data from superconductors to illustrate that the phenomenon of coherent quantum entanglement can, and does, occur at macroscopic scales; and that such behavior is very quantum. Thus he proves, quite convincingly, that quantum mechanics applies to all coherent systems.He then closes by making some very important points. (1) He shows that quantum behavior of such systems can be expressed in quantum language (wave function), relativistic language (four-vectors), or electrodynamics (vector potential, scalar potential) in an equivalent fashion. This is important, as it proves that a superconductor is macroscopic, exhibits quantum behavior, and that these quantitative results agree with those found from the other approaches. (2) He makes the point that the quantum and relativistic equations show that electromagnetic phenomena consist of two parts: one traveling forward in time; the other backward in time. Feynmann and others have said this for a long time, and he shows how thermodyn