Has Maxwell's equations, which have been proposed for more than 150 years, "subverted"?
This topic of physics theory has recently been successfully out of the loop.
Here's the thing:
Recently, the Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy and Systems of the Chinese Academy of Sciences held a press conference. At the meeting, foreign academician Wang Zhonglin said that after several years of research and experimental verification, he successfully expanded Maxwell's equations.
The press release called this achievement "an important contribution made by Chinese scientific research institutions to the innovation of basic theories of classical physics."
The results were also published in the international academic journal Materials Today.
After some netizens saw it, they said that they were "not aware of it".
However, as the incident continued to develop, this news was gradually known to the academic groups of major universities, and the wind evaluation began to change.
The physics community has raised many questions about this research, and even physics students have pointed out its mistakes. What's more, it is pointed out that this study is "civil science".
Academician Wang Zhonglin has also become a popular figure. From the end of the press conference to the response to the question, the topic has twice been on the Zhihu hot search list.
Who is this foreign academician?
From West Electric to Georgia Tech
Born in 1961 in Gaoyang Town, Pucheng County, Shaanxi Province, Wang Zhonglin was admitted to the Northwest Institute of Telecommunications Engineering (the predecessor of Xidian University) in 1978 to study physics.
After graduating from university, Wang Zhonglin went to the United States to study through the CUSPEA channel in 1982.
CUSPEA is a Sino-US joint training physics graduate program led by the famous physicist Li Zhengdao, and it can be said that CUSPEA selected basically the top physics talents in China at that time.
Cuspea began in 1979 and ended in 1989, admitting only 915 students in 11 years, cultivating a large number of physics talents, such as MIT physicist Wen Xiaogang through which he entered Princeton University.
Wang Zhonglin's study abroad career after going to the United States can also be described as quite smooth:
Ph.D. in Physics, Arizona State University, July 1987;
After graduation, he worked in research at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the United States and the National Bureau of Standards and Technical Quantification.
In 1995, he was recruited as an associate professor at georgia tech.
At Georgia Tech, Wang Zhonglin moved to the research direction of nanomaterials, mainly researching nanoenerators.
In 2009, Wang Zhonglin was elected as a foreign academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, becoming the youngest inductee at that time. Since 2010, he has participated in the establishment of the Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy and Systems of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
So far, Wang Zhonglin has cited more than 310,000, the H index is 270, and more than 2,000 papers have been published.
According to the official website of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wang Zhonglin currently ranks first in the world in the total number of citations and h-index of global materials science, ranks 5th in the lifetime scientific influence of the top 100,000 scientists across all fields in the world, and ranks 1st in the annual scientific influence in 2019.
In addition, Wang Zhonglin is the founding editor-in-chief and current editor-in-chief of nano energy academic journal Nano Energy (impact factor 17).
In the field of nanoscience, he is known as the "father of nanogenerators".
Over the years, Wang Zhonglin has won many international awards, such as the Einstein World Science Prize and the Eni Prize.
However, judging from the official website of the Einstein World Science Prize, the award has nothing to do with Einstein and his alma mater ETH.
It is an award presented by the World Council of Cultures, which is headquartered in Mexico City.
The Eni Prize is an award given by the Italian oil and gas company Eni, known as the Nobel Prize in the field of energy. Now there is also an introduction video of Wang Zhonglin's award on the Internet.
Corrections to the Myrdoch equation began a few years ago
After turning to the study of nanoernuterators, Wang Zhonglin also began his own way of "correcting" Maxwell's equations, and the initial motivation was to study and develop the theoretical framework of nanoernogenerators.
Although it has only recently become popular on the Internet, from Wang Zhonglin's speeches and papers, he has been correcting Mai's equation for a long time.
As early as 2017, Wang Zhonglin began to submit articles to Materials Today, trying to "move the knife" on Maxwell's equation system.
However, at that time, the paper only adjusted the relationship between the polarization vector and the current in the dielectric, and did not directly modify Maxwell's equations.
In 2019, Wang Zhonglin put himself alongside Faraday and Maxwell in the speech poster of a university in the PPT of a university.
△ Picture from Zhihu
The tree-shaped diagram of the latest paper has been used in both papers and speeches before.
The graph in the latest paper for 2021 looks like this:
In a 2020 paper published by Wang Zhonglin in the journal Nano Energy, of which he is the editor-in-chief, the picture is like this:
Although Wang Zhonglin has not directly modified Maxwell's equations here, from here we see the PS item he later added to the equation.
After last week's press conference, Wang Zhonglin's research results over the years were finally reported by major media.
△ Image from Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy, Chinese Academy of Sciences
The results were questioned
Unexpectedly, however, this extended Mys equation, which is called a "major original achievement", soon attracted unanimous questions from the academic community.
Before physicists questioned colleges and universities, many physics students put forward their own views.
The main points they questioned were:
1. Is it necessary to add more terms in the equation?
2. Is the equation still correct after adding a new term?
Judging from the first equation of The Mai's equation, many physics friends pointed out that the PS on the right can actually be counted in D, so that the form of the equation is no different from the original equation.
If we move the PS item on the right to the left, just think of it as one in parentheses.
In fact, PS is a polarized charge, which would have been considered within D in Maxwell's theory, and there is no need to list a separate term.
Why should this item be listed separately, Wang Zhonglin said in response to "Intellectuals" that it is mainly related to its research direction:
Our original idea was to establish a quantitative calculation of the output power of TENG (friction nanogenerator) by studying displacement currents.
As for Equation 3, Wang Zhonglin clearly pointed out in his paper that only low-speed cases were considered, no relativity was used, and the Galilean transformation of classical mechanics was used.
Maxwell's equations themselves are relativistic.
After such a change by Wang Zhonglin, the equation does not conform to either the Galileo transform nor the Lorentz transform of relativity, and becomes unremarkable.
In the face of these doubts, Wang Zhonglin said in response to "Intellectuals":
It is possible that the processed system of equations is not covariant, but it does not affect the specific object we are going to study and its application in engineering, because we are not strictly discussing field theory.
As for the more detailed theory, a Princeton Ph.D. gave his own answer. His answer was also echoed by Dai Xi, a professor in the Department of Physics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
The journal Where Academician Wang published this work, Materials Today, is actually a material journal.
The editor-in-chief is Lou Jun, who is currently the vice chairman of the Department of Materials Science and Nanoengineering at Rice University. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Tsinghua University and Ohio State University, and his Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University and the Princeton Institute for Materials Research.
It is worth noting that the impact factor of Materials Today in 2021 has reached 31.041.
However, a research on the basic problems of physics, not going to physics journals, not through strict peer review in the physics community and then publishing, but directly selecting material journals and promoting them through the media, still makes everyone feel confused.
Although the physical review letters (PRL) will only have a 9.161 in 2021, interdisciplinary impact factor comparisons are generally considered meaningless.
In addition, the results of the Nobel Prize in Physics in the past 10 years have been published in PRL.
Therefore, after Academician Wang Zhonglin published his paper, many scholars also proposed that in today's highly differentiated disciplines, professional matters should be handed over to professional people, and major disciplinary breakthroughs should be handed over to academic journals in related fields.
What do you think?