Quant-ph people have some interesting comments, but those cond-mat people just one-uped everyone:
cond-mat/0608492
Title: Do superconductors violate Lenz’s law?
Authors: J.E. Hirsch
Comments: Readers are invited to place a wager on the outcome of the proposed experiment, this http URL
Subj-class: Superconductivity; Strongly Correlated Electrons
Wagering? On the ArXiv?
Holy cr@p. This guy’s serious. Dude.
Is this the same J. Hirsch from the “h-index” fame? I believe it is.
yeah, but can we trust an experiment performed by a theorist?!
I just covered Lenz’ Law yesterday in my UNM physics class and I shocked my students when I told them that it was wrong. 🙂 At least it’s not always right when phrased as “The induced currents create a flux to oppose the change in the flux.” Faraday’s law relates the (line integral of the) electric field E to changing magnetic flux; for ohmic materials E and the induced current density J are collinear and proportional, but even in linear materials, E and J can be related by a matrix transformation that causes them to point in different directions. I told them the only way to restore Lenz’ idea to an unfalsified “Law” is to call it the minus sign in Faraday’s law. This of course makes Lenz’ Law perhaps the most trumped up minus sign in physics. 🙂
Hi Andrew,
Doesn’t the most trumped up minus sign in physics arise from fermion antisymmetry?
Peter