On one of the previous topics the following advice was given: "If hundreds of thousands of physics grad students across the planet over 70 years have gone through this from postulates to final derived theory and nobody has found an error, including experimentalists, then you don't".
Afterwards I found out that this statement is not quite true; for example, there are a substanrial number of grad students having obtained their PhD's in Quantum Field Theory who have raised objections, and believe that they have found errors; but as soon as they propagated this viewpoint they suddenly found that they could not get their articles published in peer reviewed journals anymore. One can now reason that the reviewers proved these objections wrong; however, in general these papers have been rejected by using vague terms; for example, that the objections are "too vague" or "too speculative". No real scientific arguments were used to justify the decision. So maybe the hundreds of thousands of grad students who did not report their dissent did not do so becaause of the dire consequences they feared for their careers. Maybe peer review has become an instrument to protect the top structure of scientists through which funding is allocated to the hundres of thousands of grad students, causing them to then end up having scientific frontal lobotomies?
It made me think about the following possibility: could it not have happenned that a scientific concept becomes so dogmatically accepted that hundreds of thousands of supervisors go into appoplexy when it is challenged? And this discourages grad students to re-investigate it from first principles? This would mean that an error can go on for many years, mybe even 100 or more, without being re-examined critically in terms of basic scientific principles.
What I propose to do is to raise simple topics, which have been accepted for many years (50 or more)as having passed the test of hundreds of thousands of students (and their professors) and get the participants of this forum to re-examimine the validity of the concept from basic principles.
In this thread I start off by raising the mechanism for the generation of circular currents within a superconductor which finds itself within a magnetic field.
Consider a supercondutor across which a magnetic field is generated by switching on an electromagnet so that a magnetic field increses from zero to a value B. It has been experimentally verified many times that circular currents are generated within the superconductor. They cause an opposite magnetic field that cancels the applied magnetic field, so that there is no magnetic field within the superconductor. Now the textbook question: what is the mechanism that forces the superconducting charge carriers to move in circles? Your answers will be appreciated.
What do you say Uncle Al and D A Morgan?
