Faraday's Lines of Force as Strings: from Gauss' Law to the Arrow of Time

Abstract

We reformulate classical electromagnetism as the statistical mechanics of lines of electric flux with dynamics described by the string action in four dimensions. The retarded solution to Maxwell's equations emerges naturally as an average over a microcanonical ensemble of these lines of force at high temperature.

18 pages, some typos corrected and explanations expanded

References in corpus (1)

• Field Theory Without Feynman Diagrams: One-Loop Effective Actions

Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Intersection of world-lines on curved surfaces and path-ordering of the Wilson loop
• Steps Towards Generalization of Tensionless String Theory with Contact Interactions as Wilson loop of Non-Abelian Yang-Mills Theory