A New Theory of Electromagnetism?
I was delighted to see an article by Alok Jha in the Observer on Sunday discussing Maxwell’s Equations, but my rapture was rapidly modified when I saw the image that accompanied the piece:
Since our new students are just settling into their courses in the Department of Physics & Astronomy here at the University of Sussex, I thought it would be fun to post this here and invite my readers (some of whom are students) to spot the deliberate mistake(s). More amusingly, how about offering suggestions as to what the Universe would be like if electromagnetism did indeed behave the way described by the alternative theory outlined in the Observer article.
Answers through the comment box please!
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In the Dark 
October 20, 2013 at 11:27 pm
Ooh, fun! If H stands for -cB, these are Maxwell’s equations in Euclidean signature. They’d presumably govern electromagnetism in a universe with four dimensions of space, instead of three of space and one of time. I can hardly imagine what life in such a universe might be like—I’m too used to verbs, I guess—but the paper “Euclidean Maxwell-Einstein Theory,” by Dieter Brill (http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9209009), gives some examples of the kinds of structures you might find there.