- #1
Stretto
- 7
- 0
There are certain properties of materials that are "artificial" in the sense that they have no direct physical basis but are sort of added into the evolution equations to get the right effect. I don't mean to sound like they are arbitrary but that they are more empirical and not directly derivable from first principles.
What I mean by intrinsic is that all "properties" of ordinary matter that we encounter in our everyday lives on the macroscopic level must be due to the electrical forces between the atoms and molecules of the material. That is, they are governed by Maxwell's equations.
But these properties generally are not derived from the microscopic Maxwell's equations but "artificially" inserted into equations that are suppose to govern the materials behavior. Take Viscosity. It's obviously due to the local electrical forces at the microscopic scale.
Is there a way to rewrite Maxwell's equations so that the macroscopic properties of a material "pop out" and one can cover the whole spectrum of macroscopic behavior? e.g., by expanding some factor in Maxwell's equations in a Taylor series and saying that this term goes with this macroscopic property, this term with that, etc...
That is, we know the macroscopic properties are "inside" Maxwell's equations(or should be) but they are not obvious in most cases.
Suppose we have a material that we know the exact atomic configuration of. Suppose we model it using Maxwell's equations and setup some type of simulation using it. Suppose that we know empirically that it is the color "red". When we model it we should see it as being "red"(Although it might take a little more than Maxwell's equations to deal with color). Now this property of "color" in the material surely has some term in Maxwell's equations that one can modify to change the color in the simulation(although this might effect some other properties too).
Obviously to be able to completely define all the properties of a material macroscopically is a pipe dream and usually terms are defined as properties by a lot of hard work. But because all the macroscopic properties that we experience have something to do with the EM field(and usually mostly if not all) it would seem that we might just have to rewrite Maxwell's equations in a specific way for all these properties to pop out.
By properties I mean the common ones such as color, viscosity, compressibility, permeability, capacitance, etc... These are all intrinsic as they are due to the atomic configuration(nothing global such as vorticity which would be an extrinsic property of the system).
It seems that a "property" of a material is something that has some certain type of invariance in that depends on the atomic level and macroscopically it doesn't change if the material is in some kinda state of equilibrium. It's kinda hard to define but "properties" seem to be static and independent of the equations they are used in. If they are not then possibly they are not true properties of the material. Obviously in some cases we do have "properties" that are not static so possibly the definition I'm trying to get at is not adequate or these are not true properties or simply properties cannot be perfectly defined. After all, at the atomic level we can ultimately rearrange atoms and particles to get any other material and property.
In any case I'm just curious about how we can define "properties" of materials in a meaningful way and which most likely should come from QM and Maxwell's equations(or rather QED) and how they present themselves in Maxwell's equations and if there is a natural way they can do it(as if there were a "property operator" that would return a property).
What I mean by intrinsic is that all "properties" of ordinary matter that we encounter in our everyday lives on the macroscopic level must be due to the electrical forces between the atoms and molecules of the material. That is, they are governed by Maxwell's equations.
But these properties generally are not derived from the microscopic Maxwell's equations but "artificially" inserted into equations that are suppose to govern the materials behavior. Take Viscosity. It's obviously due to the local electrical forces at the microscopic scale.
Is there a way to rewrite Maxwell's equations so that the macroscopic properties of a material "pop out" and one can cover the whole spectrum of macroscopic behavior? e.g., by expanding some factor in Maxwell's equations in a Taylor series and saying that this term goes with this macroscopic property, this term with that, etc...
That is, we know the macroscopic properties are "inside" Maxwell's equations(or should be) but they are not obvious in most cases.
Suppose we have a material that we know the exact atomic configuration of. Suppose we model it using Maxwell's equations and setup some type of simulation using it. Suppose that we know empirically that it is the color "red". When we model it we should see it as being "red"(Although it might take a little more than Maxwell's equations to deal with color). Now this property of "color" in the material surely has some term in Maxwell's equations that one can modify to change the color in the simulation(although this might effect some other properties too).
Obviously to be able to completely define all the properties of a material macroscopically is a pipe dream and usually terms are defined as properties by a lot of hard work. But because all the macroscopic properties that we experience have something to do with the EM field(and usually mostly if not all) it would seem that we might just have to rewrite Maxwell's equations in a specific way for all these properties to pop out.
By properties I mean the common ones such as color, viscosity, compressibility, permeability, capacitance, etc... These are all intrinsic as they are due to the atomic configuration(nothing global such as vorticity which would be an extrinsic property of the system).
It seems that a "property" of a material is something that has some certain type of invariance in that depends on the atomic level and macroscopically it doesn't change if the material is in some kinda state of equilibrium. It's kinda hard to define but "properties" seem to be static and independent of the equations they are used in. If they are not then possibly they are not true properties of the material. Obviously in some cases we do have "properties" that are not static so possibly the definition I'm trying to get at is not adequate or these are not true properties or simply properties cannot be perfectly defined. After all, at the atomic level we can ultimately rearrange atoms and particles to get any other material and property.
In any case I'm just curious about how we can define "properties" of materials in a meaningful way and which most likely should come from QM and Maxwell's equations(or rather QED) and how they present themselves in Maxwell's equations and if there is a natural way they can do it(as if there were a "property operator" that would return a property).