|
|
The essence of a theoretical physics work is an attempt to come up with a
new idea that helps solving problems or a new solution to a known problem.
In my opinion, the preliminary efforts of such a work
should be dedicated to the
identification of the problem and casting it into a clear form. Only after
accomplishing this task, one should try to solve the problem.
This approach is used here in an examination of the magnetic monopole
(called briefly monopole) issue. The following lines are expected
to be understandable to readers of popular science texts.
The fundamental difference between electric charge and monopole
stems from the fact that electric charge has been found in
laboratory whereas a monopole has not been found yet.
Therefore, the monopole issue is a subject of a theoretical work.
Here one relies on basic properties of electrodynamics and
in particular on the well
known relationships between electric charge and electric
field. Thus, one expects that analogous relationships exist between
magnetic charge and magnetic field. Hereafter, this correspondence
is called charge-monopole analogy.
A brief survey of the literature is a good starting point. Let us take
two very well known textbooks on classical electrodynamics: Landau
and Lifshitz, The Classical Theory of Fields and Jackson,
Classical Electrodynamics. Here one finds that Landau
and Lifshitz do not mention monopoles at all whereas Jackson
dedicates to monopoles only a very small portion of his book.
Wikipedia is a very well known source of information. According
to its principles it describes ideas that are consistent with
the current consensus. Thus, the Wikipedia
item of electric charge describes
properties of one kind of physical object (which can be either
positive or negative). On the other hand, the monopole item
of Wikipedia describes several kinds of monopoles.
The previous lines show that the
status of the electric charge is completely different from that
of the magnetic monopole. This difference is incompatible with the
charge-monopole analogy which is expected to be valid. Therefore,
it is clear that the present consensus about
magnetic monopole has not said the last word on this subject.
For this reason, monopoles look like a promising subject for a theoretical
research.
|
|
|
|
