Can magnetism from a different perspective just be fictitous forces?
Thought experiment:
Imagine a circular charged plate:
Positively charged circular plate
Now imagine a small charge:
Now imagine the electric charge flying straight above the plate in the following way:
Schematic diagram of the path of charge above the circular plate
The charge falls down onto the plate because of the electrostatic force. The plate attracts the charge just like gravity attracts a tennis ball.
What happens if you start rotating the charged plate!?
What do you think? It creates a magnetic field obviously! And the magnetic field will make the charge follow a spiral path instead of a straight path! Remember, magnetism always acts perpendicular on the path of the particle and direction of the magnetic field.
The clue: what would a rotating observer see when standing in the middle of the plate?
Imagine if the plate isn’t rotating, but an observer standing in the middle of the plate? He would also see because of fictitous forces a spiralling charge! Maybe the next paint makes it abit better to visualize:
On the left I drew an ‘eye’ to showcase the observer, on the right I drew a rotating charged plate. The path of the charge is here yellow instead of blue.
The equivalence principle is the fact that inertial mass and gravitational mass are the same. This leads to gravity having similarities to pseudo-forces, or fictitious forces. Read more in my blog posts about it or on this wiki.
Mimicking the Equivalence Principle with Charges
Imagine you could only create objects with one type of unit charge. Each unit has the same, fixed amount of mass. In other words, every unit of charge has the same amount of inertia.
Now with respect to the electrostatic force, the equivalence principle will hold!
Think about it, in any electric field charges will accelerate at the same speed regardless of their composition.
Example:
Imagine you could only create objects with electrons, which has a fixed charge -1 and fixed amount of mass. If you place these created objects in a constant unchanging electric field, they will all experience the same magnitude of acceleration! Just like gravity does!
So the force on these objects will be proportional to the charge obviously. But in the exact same matter the mass of these objects will increase! In other words, for a 4-electron object the force will be four times as big, but inertia also 4 times as big. Thus the acceleration of a 4-electron object will be exactly the same as the acceleration of just 1-electron object or trillion-electron object. Does this ring a bell somewhere?
Shitty paint explanation of charges mimicking the Equivalence Principle
The reason that there is no actual equivalence principle is because you make in real life objects that differ how their inertia changes w.r.t. charge. There are different particle with different ratios of Electrostatic Charge and Inertial Mass. There are actually 10 electrostatic building blocks. Thus electrostatics can’t be described completely as a fictitious force just like Gravity. Every particle (as far as we know) obeys the inertial mass = gravitational mass. There is not a particle known that has a different inertial mass than gravitational mass. Maybe we will find one in the future, that would be exciting!
Imagine we actually haven’t found stuff that actually have different ratios of gravitational mass and inertial mass.
A writing place. 