>>13096601>Color charge is conserved, but there’s no Gauss’ law for the strong interactionthis is a fair objection, that was a very handwavy comment of mine
>And if you have to bring in additional information to get Gauss’ law anyway, you may as well just start from Coulomb’s law, which is pedagogically grounded in a real experimental setup, rather than the abstraction of force fields and sources and sinks thereofI don't think so, because if you're looking for a rigorous formulation of physics (which I think is stupid but I'm just playing along with what the OP wants) you'd want to start from the minimal possible set of ideas.
Starting from Gauss' law and Ampere's law is particularly nice because you only have to make very natural assumptions, whereas if we started from Coulomb's law we'd end up with "why can't it be just approximately 1/r^2" (i.e. why not another very small parameter), and "why not something else altogether" because it is in some way a very unnatural perspective to begin with. If on the other hand we stick to Gauss' law (and we know the relationship between electrostatic force and field) then it's more theoretically satisfying, because there's no other possible choice for the force. Which is why it seems to me to be best to do it this way, because although they're technically equivalent, by taking this perspective you're showing that there isn't any other choice other than Coulomb's law.
That said, I do agree it was probably not justified to say it was flat out wrong to start that way as it was historically done like that and I'm not quite sure why I bothered to word it so strongly other than not really liking OP's question kek
