Talk:Electric field

E-fields are just mathematical abstractions? No. Since the time of Maxwell we have known that e-fields and b-fields are two facets of electromagnetic fields and they contain electrical energy. E. g., if a positive charge is pulled away from a negative charge, energy is stored in the surrounding e-field pattern. (A mathematical abstraction cannot store electrical energy!) In modern QM and Gauge theory, we regard the classical fields as being caused by photon exchange, both magnetic fields and electrostatic fields are "made" of photons.--Wjbeaty 11:22, Feb 28, 2005 (UTC)

Is this ever called E-field? I would like to replace "In physics, an electric field or E-field" with "In physics, an electric field (also known as an electrostatic field)" since 'electrostatic field' is very common usage (I just saw it in the wikipedia requests and redirected to this page) Shameer 03:12, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

In physics, we always called 'em by the names "e-field" and "b-field." The phrase "electrostatic field" has too many syllables for convenient use in heated late-night conversations! Search google for e-field: 149,000 hits, while "electrostatic field" gets only 75,000 hits: [1] (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=%22e-field%22)

I don't like the formulation with the r vector on top and the r^3 on the bottom. Can we have r^2 on the bottom and an r unit vector on top? I think for young people (high school students) this could be confusing to them. It might lead them to think that the electrostatic force is proportional to 1/r^3, which it is not. For the article to be written for all audiences, I believe it should use the form that I prefer, using a unit vector instead. Comments? --Dave

Done. Dave is right, it is confusing with r^3. Of course, some readers may not understand what the hat means, and finding out isn't very easy, but that's alright. Maybe someone can make a note of it in the text (though that might require inline TeX :P ). The reason I didn't do it this way to start with is that the formulas were written before TeX came along: there wasn't really any way to make a hat. Do you think the vectors should be on the top of the fraction, or outside the fraction like I just did it? -- Tim Starling 05:38 Apr 1, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm glad someone else prefers it this way. It is nice to look at a formula and right away see the dependency that you care about, without having to think about the vector. BTW, I like the vector "outside" the \frac like you did it. Very clean, separates the magnitude part from the vector part. Totally unambiguous. --dave

p.s. Do you know if we are supposed to be using TeX for everything? I read the page about Wiki mathematics or whatever, but it sort of left the issue up in the air. It said that TeX is bad for inline due to the weird line heights it creates, and it is slow for web pages to load and text browsers can't see it. But it's so easy to write in TeX style. Is there any consensus?

I'm basically boycotting TeX -- I didn't participate in "texification" except in a few special cases. See wikitech-l Jan 2003 (http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-January/subject.html) under "ugly <math>" for why -- I argued that it's ugly, due to being too large compared to the text, but everyone just ignored me and argued against me on all sorts of silly little points while ignoring the obvious issues. Also, you can't wikify TeX like you can HTML -- if it was up to me I would have left the magnetic field formulas like this (http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Magnetic_field&oldid=653633). Getting back the point, no I don't think there is any consensus, although I wasn't really following the mailing lists back then. Now that the range of TeX displayed as HTML is bigger than it was originally, you can probably use TeX in most cases. -- Tim Starling 06:50 Apr 1, 2003 (UTC)

Ghitis -- your new definition did not use standard physics language, so I reverted it. The electric field is a very well-defined concept in physics, and 'spatial manifestation' and 'material entity' are not. Tantalate 19:57, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)