Talk:Electromagnetic phenomena

section 5

Near end of section 5 it says "take \varrho and the vector \varphi,\ \mathfrak{u}', such as they are in the element dS"

It seems as if "as" should read "that". However, I am not sure I ought to make such a change, because as it it is maybe not strictly incorrect English (grammar or spelling), so maybe it should be considered a part of the author's style rather than a typo or error. ???

Knotwork (talk) 13:18, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

section 7

Near start of section 7 it says "Our second special case is that of a particle having an electric moment, i.e. a small space S, with a total charge \int\varrho\ x\ dS,\ \int\varrho\ y\ dS,\ \int\varrho\ z\ dS have values differing from 0."

This seems incorrect English grammar. But I am not sure whether or how to fix it. My intuition tells me it should say "has" instead of "have", but the grammar is bad enough that I am not totally sure what it is really trying to say, and afterall it is a historic document so to speak so I am hesitant to mess with it too much.

Knotwork (talk) 13:42, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

It goes on to say "Let x, y, z be the coordinates, taken relatively to a fixed point A" ; normally in such papers they tend to say "relative to", leading me to wonder what difference might or might not be intended by saying "relatively to" instead of the (in my reading seemingly more normal) "relative to". Is there a difference? Or is this merely style? Again I am hesitant to change it though in a Wikipedia article I certainly would change it...

Knotwork (talk) 13:46, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for your edits, which are mostly correct. However, those grammatical errors you pointed in sections 5 and 7, actually appeared in the original paper of Lorentz - who was no native English speaker. So those passages should remain unchanged in the article. --D.H (talk) 14:51, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

section 10

I changed "deflexions" to "deflections" because dictionaries returned the word deflection when consulted about deflexions, but it seems to me that if a word "deflexions" did exist it would have a meaning different from that of deflections; the word deflexions does appear in google lookups, although not always clearly intended seriously. Maybe online dictionaries are simply not complete as so highly technical terms of physics?

Knotwork (talk) 15:03, 11 April 2009 (UTC)