"Art Unwin" wrote in message
...

Too late David
But I have a question for you, Does the New World ( Rumsfield) use
the term "equilibrium" in any of the engineering curriculums or are
you quoting what appears to be American English and not that of the
Olde World? Personaly if I was dealing with entropy or those wonderful
graphic steam tables +equilibrium" would be discarded in favor of
yours. But to explain all that stuff would be impossible with this
group so I opted for the Universal term that was current in Newton and
Maxwell time. Maybe what we are seeing is a intrusion of new math
into physics! Either way it does explain to me why american jaws
dropped in ignorance when the term was used.

there is no 'equilibrium' used in the electromagnetics texts in my
collection that i can find. 'steady state' is the closest, but that is
normally used to refer to the response of a system after the transient
response has died out. 'equilibrium' is often used in thermodynamics, but
any analogy to that in electromagnetics is useless as it refers to a state
where there is no energy flow, and if energy isn't flowing then you have no
radiation. 'equilibrium' could also refer to a mechanical system that has
reached 'steady state' or a stable state, but again similar to the
thermodynamic use it is useless for electromagnetics... maybe for
electrostatic or static magnetic fields, but not for radiation.