|
|
|
|
|
|
by Certhas
2714 days ago
|
|
|
The teaching will vary greatly depending on teacher. But I remember that I was told that rigid bodies, and hence centre of mass thinking did not work in relativistic mechanics. It's very possible that as a student I never put that together with the inadmissibility of point charges in EM. I must insist though that EM has no problem with initial value formulations. It simply doesn't provide you with a theory of matter. It turns out that that theory of matter really requires QM, hence in EM we never bother with non-QM models of relativistic matter. That's why you have to look in the GR literature. As a pedagogical point I can agree that the limits of the conceptual foundations of our theories are never really explored enough. EM turns out to be fine, the field tensors are completely measurable, but that's a really cool paper that isn't taught either: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-009-9349-5_... As for charged dust, it works even if you switch on GR as well: http://www.numdam.org/article/AIHPA_1973__18_2_137_0.pdf |
|
|