Philip J Mann

Philip J. Mann
Philip J. Mann
Residence	Storrs, CT, United States
Nationality	USA
Known for	New Gaussian Electrodynamics; the force between current elements; reinterpretation of the Hafele–Keating experiment
	Scientific career
Fields	Electrodynamics

Philip Jay Mann is an American research scientist and one of the principal contributors to New Gaussian Electrodynamics, the reformulation of electromagnetic theory developed at the University of Connecticut by Parry Moon and Domina Eberle Spencer. Working from Storrs, Connecticut, he published some forty papers between 1992 and 2009, most of them in Physics Essays and in the proceedings of the Natural Philosophy Alliance, of which Spencer was a founder and long-serving president.

Mann's work is unusually coherent for this field: nearly all of it pursues a single question, the one Gauss himself identified as fundamental — what is the correct equation for the force between two relatively moving charges? — and traces its consequences through induction, mass variation, timekeeping and gravitation. He is a co-author, with Moon, Spencer, Arjan S. Mirchandaney and Uma Shama, of "The Derivation of a New Gaussian Equation for the Force Between Moving Charges from Fundamental Postulates" in Physics Essays.

The Gaussian programme

The tradition Mann works in holds that nineteenth-century electrodynamics took a wrong turn. Ampère proposed an equation for the force between current elements in 1823; Weber and Gauss derived force laws between moving charges from scalar potentials consistent with it. In 1845 Grassmann published an alternative — the expression now generally known as the Lorentz force — and it is Grassmann's form, not Ampère's, that entered the textbooks.

The difference is not cosmetic. The Ampère–Weber–Gauss laws are central forces acting along the line joining two elements, and so satisfy Newton's third law in its strong form between the elements themselves. The Grassmann–Lorentz force does not: for open circuits it produces a net force on an isolated system, which standard theory resolves by assigning momentum to the field. Mann's papers return repeatedly to configurations where the two predictions can be told apart — Graneau's exploding-wire and railgun experiments, the Hering furnace, overhead welding, and above all unipolar induction.

A recurring feature of his method is what he called the three viewpoints approach: taking one experiment and working it through classical electromagnetic theory, through Weber's equation, and through the new Gaussian equation in parallel, so that the point of divergence is made explicit rather than argued about in the abstract. Several papers from 1997–1998 carry that construction in their titles.

The force equation

In "The Force Between Current Elements" (Physics Essays, 1994) Mann derives a time-variant generalization of the Grassmann equation and then proposes a new equation for the force between current elements that satisfies the criteria suggested by Gauss and Hertz — chiefly that the force depend on relative rather than absolute velocity, and that it follow from a scalar potential. Companion papers examine whether Maxwell's equations can be derived from the Lorenz retarded potentials, and how partial and total derivatives should be handled in retarded force equations, a technical point on which he argues the standard treatment is inconsistent.

Mass variation without variable mass

One of the sharper consequences appears in "The Electrodynamic Interpretation of Mass Variation". Taking a charged particle accelerated in a uniform electric field, Mann compares three formulations and isolates the critical difference: whether the force is defined in terms of absolute velocity or relative velocity. If absolute, a velocity-dependent mass must be introduced to reproduce the observed trajectory. If relative — as in both the Weber and new Gaussian equations — he argues the same trajectory follows with a mass that does not vary.

This is the programme's characteristic move. Rather than deny the experimental results that relativity accounts for, it relocates the velocity dependence from the particle's mass into the force law, and claims the observations do not distinguish the two.

The Hafele–Keating reinterpretation

Mann's most pointed contribution is "A New Interpretation of the Hafele-Keating Experiment" (1996), written with the Spencer group. The 1971 experiment, in which caesium clocks were flown around the world and compared against the master clock in Washington, is among the most frequently cited confirmations of relativistic time dilation. Mann's paper notes that the original publication did not include the raw data, that Richard Keating supplied it to the authors on request, and argues that the data are equally consistent with a universal time postulate on the velocity of light.

The claim is worth stating precisely, because it is easy to overstate in either direction. Mann does not dispute the clock readings; he disputes that they discriminate between relativity and the Gaussian alternative. Whether the reinterpretation succeeds is a separate question from whether the raw data should have been published — and on the second point the paper's complaint is a reasonable one about scientific practice.

Charge clusters and gravitation

Mann's later work turns to gravitation and to the stability of charge. "The Spinning Charged Ring" (2005, 2006) and "The Stability of a Spinning Charged Ring" (2007) take the simplest model of a charge cluster — a spinning ring — and ask whether gravitational and electromagnetic forces can sum to zero to hold it in dynamic equilibrium, comparing the answer under classical and new Gaussian theory. The question connects his electrodynamics to the charge-cluster work of Ken Shoulders and to the ring models of the electron pursued elsewhere on this wiki.

"The 21st Century Form of Newton's Gravitational Equation" (2007) extends the same reasoning to gravity, and "The Gravitational Explanation of the Seasonal Variations in Chemical Processes Observed by Roberto and Emilio Monti" (2005) applies it to a reported annual periodicity in chemical reaction rates.

Assessment

The strength of Mann's work is its focus and its testability. Where much dissident electrodynamics argues from interpretation, he concentrates on specific laboratory configurations where competing force laws give different answers — railguns, exploding wires, unipolar generators, the Hering furnace — and works each one through several formalisms side by side. That is the right way to conduct such a dispute.

The difficulty is one the Ampère–Grassmann literature has never fully resolved. It is a classical theorem that the Ampère and Grassmann force laws give identical net forces on closed circuits, which is what any real experiment ultimately involves; the disagreement is confined to the fictitious "current element," and detecting it requires isolating a part of a circuit in a way that is very hard to do cleanly. Papers on this wiki reach opposite conclusions about whether the Pappas–Moyssides bridge experiments settled the matter — Paul Wesley and Jan Olof Jonson take opposing views — which is a fair indication of how difficult the measurement is.

The wider claim is harder still. Momentum is conserved in standard electrodynamics once field momentum is counted, and field momentum is not a bookkeeping device: the Graham–Lahoz experiment measured it directly. A theory that dispenses with it takes on the burden of explaining that result. And while the Hafele–Keating reinterpretation may be defensible on the 1971 data alone, the relativistic account has since been confirmed by measurements Mann's papers do not address — muon storage-ring lifetimes at γ ≈ 29, Ives–Stilwell second-order Doppler to parts in 10⁸, and the ~38 µs/day correction applied continuously in the GPS system.

Publications

The Gaussian programme

The force equation

Mass variation without variable mass

The Hafele–Keating reinterpretation

Charge clusters and gravitation

Assessment

Publications

Force laws and the foundations of electrodynamics

Induction and the unipolar generator

Experiments interpreted through competing force laws

Relativity, time and mass

Gravitation, charge clusters and mathematical method

See also