3. Aharonov, Yakir:
Renowned Israeli quantum physicist and former student of David Bohm. Together with Bohm, Aharonov authored a fundamental paper in 1959 which pointed out the primary importance of the potential rather than the force field. Co-discoverer of the Aharonov-Bohm effect: Even when the electromagnetic force fields reduce to zero in a charged particle system, the potentials may still exist and interfere to cause real physical effects. Our own comment is that the field concept in electrodynamics is presently used in two different, mutually contradictory manners: (1) it is considered to be a force field in matter, where force F is identically d/dt(mv) and thus contains mass as a component; and (2) it is considered to be a force-free entity in space in the absence of mass, which is a non sequitur since no spatial entity can exist in time (only spacetime entities do). We can easily see the folly of this dual concept by taking the electric force field E in mass, where E = F/q and where F = d/dt(mv), and then replacing "m" by 0. Multiplication by zero on the right makes the entire right term identically zero, which in term makes F identically zero. But F is the numerator of the right term in E = F/q, and hence E = 0. In the absence of mass, the field vanishes, as pointed out by Feynman and Wheeler. Indeed, only the "potential" for the field exists in spacetime, should a unit point charge (which has mass) be placed there. Without placing the charged mass there, there can be no field. This problem is resolved in the Sachs unified field theory, and particularly in the Evans-Vigier O(3) electrodynamics subset of Sachs' theory. There the fields arise and exist as curvatures in spacetime. The interaction of the field (spacetime curvature) with mass (actually during its mass-time phases of its parts), produces the effect (the material field). The problem is that the observable effect (frozen 3-space snapshot, at a moment in time, and not even existing thereafter), is thoroughly confused in physics with the nonobservable cause (4-spatial entity). Until the confusion of cause and effect is corrected in physics, electromagnetics will continue to remain muddled.