Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-flows-fluctuations-and-complexity-and-symmetry-and-relativity-paper-of-part-b-of-the-physics-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2011/8/1/solution

Covered by the official notes: definitions of four-force and four-velocity and the vanishing antisymmetric contraction (PDF p. 15; handwritten p. 10).[ref]
To make the necessity statement precise, mass preservation must hold for every allowed timelike four-velocity, with the same field tensor and nonzero charge. It is not necessary for one prescribed trajectory alone. Use metric signature , so . Put . The mass-preservation condition requires the quadratic form for every timelike . Every timelike vector can be rescaled to a physical four-velocity; by homogeneity the quadratic form vanishes on the open timelike cone. A polynomial vanishing on an open set is identically zero, so . Thus the electromagnetic field tensor must be antisymmetric under this universal quantifier. For a single velocity, the scalar contraction can vanish even for a nonzero symmetric part, which is why the quantifier is essential.

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