Wesley supports the claim by Graneau that Ampère’s law is able to account for the phenomenon called ‘Graneau’s exploding wires’, He bases the assumption on the same theoretical model as in an earlier treated case of Ampère’s bridge, where he derives the forces involved within the bridge using Ampère’s law. He also resolves a problem which he claims Graneau has been unable to treat in a satisfactory way: avoiding infinite expressions for the force when two current elements being infinitesimally close to each other are taken into account. Graneau has also assumed the necessity of including a Lorentz force term, in addition to Ampère’s law. The author has, in previous research, proposed Coulomb’s law as responsible for all electromagnetic interaction, thus sidestepping both Ampère’s law and Lorentz’ force law, as in the case of Ampère’s bridge. This method appears to be successful also in the case of Graneau’s exploding wires, since the Coulomb force may again be interpreted as in the case of Ampère´s Bridge. As one may conclude from this description, there is deep confusion about which theory is most suitable, and this renders obvious the need for resolving the conflict.
The benefit of both Ampère’s law and Coulomb’s law is that they both imply a force component between collinear currents. However, Coulomb’s law is able to predict the breaking of wires, whereas in the case of Ampère’s law, some still unknown factors need to be defined. A study of experiments being performed during the last decade shows that the focus of interest has moved from the theoretical foundations behind wire breaks to studying effects related to the breaks, especially Z-pinch effects. The ruptures of wires are treated more like empirical facts when applying high enough voltage. The consequence of giving credit to Coulomb’s law in this case will also impact other experiments involving electromagnetic forces, due to the universal nature of Coulomb’s law.
