6 ms·
> By this, do you mean the typical EM formulation of Maxwell's laws produces Gauss's law and Faraday's law (which are instructive) where as the Geometric Algebr
by nyssos 3y ago
> By this, do you mean the typical EM formulation of Maxwell's laws produces Gauss's law and Faraday's law (which are instructive) where as the Geometric Algebra formula produces ∇F = J (less instructive?).
> Can you explain a bit more what you mean here please?
It's all downstream of geometric algebra leaving the metric implicit in its operations, basically
- The metric is an extremely important physical quantity: it doesn't necessarily look that way when everything is classical and flat, but you have to start caring about it in curved spacetimes.
- Even when the metric can be safely neglected, doing so makes it very easy to confuse degree (n-k) elements of your vector space V with degree k elements of its dual V. V and V are isomorphic but not canonically isomorphic - you have to choose a basis. And keeping track of where you introduce a choice of basis matters, because all physical quantities are basis-independent. Nature has no preferred coordinate system.
- Geometric algebra doesn't make sense on a general manifold: you have to embed it in a sufficiently large geometric algebra and inherit structure from the embedding. This is better than working in a particular coordinate chart but worse than doing differential geometry in a purely geometric way.
- Geometric algebra is not invariant under diffeomorphism, which means GR is dead in the water. You can build mostly equivalent theories by enforcing the equivalence principle in your dynamics instead, but it's more complicated and ironically far less geometric.