Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-m8qmq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T22:59:10.790Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

On Tubes of Force in a special class of electromagnetic fields

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2009

Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Professor Whittaker, in a paper entitled “On Tubes of Electromagnetic Force” {see Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Vol. XLII., Part I. (No 1)}, introduces certain surfaces, which he names calamoids, in connection with an electromagnetic field in the four-dimensional world of space-time. The calamoids consist of “a convariant family of surfaces which when the field is purely electrostatic or purely magnetostatic reduce to the ordinary Faraday tubes of force.” Professor Whittaker, in the paper referred to, also introduces two sets of surfaces, each a covariant family of ∞2 surfaces, one of them named the electropotential surfaces, and the other family the magnetopotential surfaces of the electromagnetic field. The electropotential surfaces and the magnetopotential surfaces are shown to be everywhere absolutely orthogonal. (One member of each family meeting at a point, any line from this point in the one family is orthogonal to every line through the point in the other family). Moreover, a “calamoid, at every one of its points, is half-parallel and half-orthogonal to the electropotential surface which passes through the point, and is also half-parallel and half-orthogonal to the magnetopotential surface which passes through the point.”

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Edinburgh Mathematical Society 1922