Electrodynamics in Moving Media

In Chap. 9 we analyzed the relativistic formulation of a continuous distribution of matter S in the presence of thermal phenomena. In this chapter we propose to extend the results of Chap. 9 to the case of a charged mass distribution. To achieve this goal we must answer the following questions: How do we write Maxwell’s equations in matter? How do we describe the interaction between electromagnetic fields and matter? We describe the most famous answers to the above questions (Minkowski, Abraham, Chu, Ampère, Boffi), showing their complete equivalence. In fact, we show that we can transform one model of matter proposed by one of the above proposals into another one by simply changing the fundamental variables by which we decide to describe the electromagnetic field. Consequently, the different models do not supply a microscopic physical description of matter. This is due to the fact that we cannot measure the electromagnetic fields inside a body, but we can evaluate only their exterior effects on matter.