(May 24, 2017 at 5:01 pm)Alex K Wrote:(May 24, 2017 at 4:47 pm)Jehanne Wrote: I am reading Introduction to Electrodynamics, 3rd edition, by David Griffiths; on page 328, he states, "Apparently God just didn't make any magnetic charge..."
I have noticed this a lot in some of the physics textbooks that I own; is this a standing joke among physicists?
I strongly suspect Griffiths is tongue-in-cheek invoking Einstein's use of God as nature here...
That being said, magnetic monopoles are not ruled out to exist at all. They appear rather automatically in extended field theories as opposed to pure electrodynamics where they are somewhat unnatural.
In all fairness to Griffiths, he does not rule-out magnetic monopoles entirely. I have noticed the same "God verbiage" in Halliday, Resnick and Walker's book Fundamentals of Physics, also. Of course, Alex, you are definitively "in the know" on this one, and so, I think that you are correct here. I have heard that physicists are the most unbelieving of the sciences, but have also heard that of biology, also.
