aaah the physics it hurts me
E&M is scary, evil stuff. I don't like it a lot. Or even a little. Earlier today I thought I understood something... but I was wrong. We have a test next week. It was originally supposed to be Monday but from the sound of things it's probably going to be moved to Wednesday. That's a slight relief with the zone meeting coming up this weekend,
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I've never been here before (I've seen you hanging around in the BSG fandom occasionally), so consider this a shout-out from a fellow victim of the physics. *waves*
Regarding vector potentials and adding zeros and stuff:
I'm not sure a vector potential as such always has a physical meaning. Sometimes it's just a mathematical quantity that aquires physical meaning (physical meaning = being an observable quantity, I guess) through a mathematical operation you perform on it. In the case you're talking about (I assume) that would be the curl B (i.e. the magnetic induction B = rot A) of the (physically meaningless) vector potential A.
I think the deal with the two different vector potentials is to show that for solving the Maxwell equation(s) it doesn't make a difference whether the magnetic induction B uses vector potential A or A' = A + something, since "something" reacts to the curl by, ah, vanishing. So ultimately you are free to choose whichever vector potential you want (without loss of generality, and all that), and are thus ( ... )
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Thanks a bunch! I'll probably never really get it, hehe, but it's a lot less "zomgwtf why the frak am I doing this?!?" now. I think I was missing the connection between the vector potential and gauge.
Great GR story btw. :D I'm going to be chuckling all day now. That's a classic.
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Oh, I'm still suffering. I've yet to finish my thesis and I'll most probably do a PhD afterwards - so quite a lot of suffering to come.
(Well, I brought this on myself, I guess.)
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Just mentioning your physicy classes gives me head aches. XD
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