Understanding the Planck blackbody spectrum and Landau diamagnetism within classical electromagnetism

Abstract

Electromagnetism is a relativistic theory, and one must exercise care in coupling this theory with nonrelativistic classical mechanics and with nonrelativistic classical statistical mechanics. Indeed historically, both the blackbody radiation spectrum and diamagnetism within classical theory have been misunderstood because of two crucial failures: (1) the neglect of classical electromagnetic zero-point radiation, and (2) the use of erroneous combinations of nonrelativistic mechanics with relativistic electrodynamics. Here we review the treatment of classical blackbody radiation, and show that the presence of Lorentz-invariant classical electromagnetic zero-point radiation can explain both the Planck blackbody spectrum and Landau diamagnetism at thermal equilibrium within classical electromagnetic theory. The analysis requires that relativistic electromagnetism is joined appropriately with simple nonrelativistic mechanical systems which can be regarded as the zero-velocity limits of relativistic systems, and that nonrelativistic classical statistical mechanics is applied only in the low-frequency limit when zero-point energy makes no contribution.