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This is a good example of one of the errors that I often see in what is otherwise the best scientific writing, which is either forgetting to specify what a certain model says, or simply straight up forgetting/confusing that a certain model isn't reality. Maxwell's equations say that light doesn't interact. Maxwell's equations are known to be wrong in that way. They're still a very good simplifying case that you can do very well with using, by all means, just like Newtonian physics in the right conditions, but they aren't the way reality works. Maxwell's equations also have no place to put a gravity term, yet gravity clearly affects light. The one I probably see the most often is articles about black holes confidently speaking about "what goes on below the event horizon" from an Einstein relativity point of view, which is where you get all the singularities and ring singularities that lead to different universes somehow, etc, again either forgetting to point out or simply forgetting entirely that those are the specific predictions of Einstein relativity, which is known to be inadequate to describe the inside of a black hole. It is certainly fair to discuss that theory's predictions, and whatever really is happening in there, relativity will certain shine some sort of light on it, but it is a mistake to present it simply as "what happens on the inside". The model is known to be broken here. I am working out how to phrase this in a way that makes sense to the HN crowd because this tends to ruffle feathers when I say it, but this is all what should be well-known stuff. It's not like I'm "denying science" when I say this; quite the contrary! It's "denying science" when you insist the known-by-science-to-be-broken models are in fact not broken where the science is pretty clear that they are. |
The place to put the "gravity term" is in the coordinate system that Maxwell's equations take place in, and the definition of the derivative which is implicitly brought in via the curls, divergences, etc. That's general relativity, and Maxwell's equations are already fully compatible with it.
>[this tends to ruffle feathers when I say it] ... It's "denying science" when you insist the known-by-science-to-be-broken models are in fact not broken where the science is pretty clear that they are.
People are probably taking issue with your use of the words "broken" and "wrong," because you're describing a car that says 90mph on the dealership's sticker but can't go 900mph as "broken," or a one pound lump of beef as "wrong," because although the butcher said it weighed a pound, and you were charged for a pound, it'd be nice if it were two.