Abstract:

This talk presents the central thesis of the Fields & Energy Project: electromagnetism is not best understood as the action of a single entity, the photon, endowed with the mutually contradictory properties of localized particle and non-localized wave. Instead, electromagnetic phenomena emerge from the interaction of two distinct elements: spatially extended fields that behave as waves, and energy that, in the quantum limit, is transferred in discrete amounts. Fields guide energy.

Through examples drawn from fields and their interactions, antenna theory, and atomic emission and absorption, this talk demonstrates how the fields-and-energy model provides a conceptually coherent and technically productive framework. This perspective clarifies long-standing puzzles associated with radiation reaction and wave-particle duality and connects Maxwellian theory, quantum emission and absorption, and engineering practice within a unified narrative.

The broader aim is to recover conceptual clarity in the foundations of physics, to reestablish continuity between classical and quantum descriptions, and to examine the historical and philosophical developments that shaped modern interpretations. By restoring a disciplined distinction between fields and energy, the talk argues for a simpler and more intelligible account of electromagnetic processes — one capable of unifying principles across physics and engineering.

Transcript

This is a machine-generate transcription of the audio track, lightly edited.

Introduction by Benoit Derat, Technical Program Chair

Benoit: I won’t read Hans’s biography, you can find it also in the program, you can find it on the slide and you can read it by yourself. Instead of that, I will tell you a more personal story.

So when I was a PhD student, the first conference I attended. I’m sorry to say that was not the IEEE-EMC symposium. That was back in 2005, the IEEE AP Symposium in Washington DC back then. And I found on one of the technical sessions a presentation with an intriguing name and so I decided to enter the room and see what was presented there.

That was my first contact with Dr. Hans Schantz where I saw him giving a complete different take at how dipole radiation in time domain, how the energy transfers. I was literally blown away by the way he was looking at things. And he was at this time finishing a book, The Art and Science of Ultrawideband Antennas.

And as a consequence, I decided to buy it. And after reading that book, I would say, Dr. Schantz’s research had his hook on me. So, I kept on following his work over the years, and as I was appointed Technical Program Chair, I was delighted to have a possibility to offer you a talk from Hans today, who will present you how electromagnetism and quantum mechanics work and where physics went wrong.

I think it’s gonna be a thought-provoking presentation. I’m looking forward to also have a Q&A with this audience. Hans, welcome on stage. Please welcome the speaker.

Introduction by Hans G. Schantz, Keynote Speaker

Hans: Thank you, Benoit. Well, I’d like to thank Benoit and the Technical Program Committee for this wonderful opportunity to be with you here today. My topic is going to be “how electromagnetism and quantum mechanics work and where physics went wrong.”

An Introduction About Models

I want to begin by talking a little bit about the concept of a model.

Charlie Munger, who is Warren Buffet’s, one of his financial advisors and partners, commented that if you only have one or two models, human psychology being what it is, you will distort reality to fit your model.

The famous warfighter John Boyd came up with the concept of the OODA loop, observe, orient, decide, and act. You observe what’s going on in your tactical situation. You use your models, or as he called them, doctrines, to organize that information and orient yourself to try to control the pace of your tactical activities. His comment, if you’ve only got one doctrine, you’re a dinosaur, period.

And from the context of physics and science, Richard Feynman noted in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, that he had stumbled across a unique method for solving some difficult integrals, differentiating under the It was a technique that was not widely known or applied and the result was that his colleagues and fellow students would bring problems to him and he would be able to solve it because he had, as he called it, a different box of tools, a useful model that was not in common use.

That brings me to the question of models in electromagnetism.

Having a rich repertoire of models is essential to the practicing engineer, providing multiple ways to look at and solve and interpret and understand problems. Today I’m going to be sharing with you a model I call the “Fields & Energy” model. I’m going to talk about fundamentals and origins of electromagnetism, where physics went wrong, and finally how electromagnetism and quantum mechanics work.

Fundamentals and Origins

We can start by looking at what Faraday accomplished. He would heat a sheet of wax paper and sprinkle iron filings on it and put it on top of a magnet, allow it to cool, capture the patterns and study these mysterious field lines.

That gave him the insight to develop the laws of induction and the fundamental physics behind all the motors and generators that we use today.

Those insights were put into a mathematical form by James Clerk Maxwell.

Now, those, of course, were streamlined by Oliver Heaviside into the four familiar vector relationships that we use today. And what he discovered is that an electromagnetic wave was an electric wave and a magnetic wave operating at right angles.

And he demonstrated that they move at the speed of light, suggesting that light was an electromagnetic phenomenon.

Telegraphy & The Origins of Applied Electromagnetism

The first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1858 and it very quickly failed. It never worked very well because the signals were muddied and distorted. And it was because of poor design and poor understanding of the fundamental underlying science.

It was 1866 before the first successful cable was laid. Some of the anomalies that were seen were things like signals propagating faster in one direction than in the other direction. And, of course, the frequency dispersion completely limited the ability to send signals very long distances at any reasonable rate and put a practical limitation on being able to do telephony at any distance beyond very, very short ranges.

Those problems were solved by this guy, Oliver Heaviside. He came up with the telegrapher’s equation to describe how the transmission lines that we still deal with today work.

The key insight that Heaviside had is that an electromagnetic wave has a balance of electric and magnetic energy.

The transmission lines of the day tended to be capacitive. They were overly electric. So by putting a loading coil, adding some induction or some magnetic energy, he was able to eliminate the distortion and send signals through the lines without problems.

Electromagnetic Energy Flow

Well, about the same time in the 1880s, John Henry Pointing came up with his rule for how fields guide energy, the Poynting vector.

And I’ll spare you the wall of text about right-handed screws and which direction they’re turning, all of that was encapsulated in Heaviside’s much simpler vector format.

The Poynting vector equals the cross product of the electric field and the magnetic field — a relation that we still use today.

Heaviside commented that when energy goes from place to place, it has to traverse the intermediate space. He gave this physical interpretation of these laws of electromagnetic energy transfer.

Similarly, Pointing commented that the surrounding medium has to contain part of the energy and it’s capable of transferring it from point to point. These weren’t just ad hoc additions that Heaviside and Poynting were making.

It goes back to Maxwell himself, who insisted there had to be a medium or substance in which the energy exists after it leaves one system and before it gets to another one.

He added, I think this medium as a hypothesis ought to occupy a prominent space in our investigations, and we ought to endeavor to construct a mental representation of it, and that has been his constant aim in his treatise on electricity and magnetism.

Well, along came Heinrich Hertz, who did experiments that caught electromagnetic waves in the act of moving from place to place. But Hertz was more than just a brilliant experimentalist. He was an excellent theoretician as well.

He created these diagrams of the dipole field and worked out the equations that describe how dipoles work.

How an oscillating charge distribution or an oscillating current segment gives rise to the dipole fields. Schelkunoff and Friis some 70 or 80 years later would comment that the dipole equations that Hertz discovered are “the most fundamental and important equations in antenna science.”

What Went Wrong?

So what went wrong with this brilliant start to our understanding of electricity and magnetism?

Well, the first thing that happened is this guy, William Crooks, invented this marvelous thing called a Crooks tube, the first cathode ray tube. And J.J. Thompson used that cathode ray tube to discover the electron.

So, after the discovery of the electron, everyone was fascinated that we’d reduced electricity and magnetism to atoms of electricity.

People started thinking in terms of charges as being the fundamental entity that we’re dealing with in electricity and magnetism. If you have the radial field lines extending from your charge and you start to move it, the change in that radial field line propagates outward at the speed of light.

Radiation as a kinked field line from an accelerating charge, courtesy CalTech.

You get the transverse kinks that you see in the radial field pattern and that basically radiation is a kinked field line. Well, that model, the model of a single charge radiating, has really taken hold in a lot of thinking about how electricity and magnetism work.

Feynman, for instance, rediscovered a formula that Heaviside had originally derived back in 1902 [Yes, I know Feynman says “1902,” and I said it too. It’s really “1904.” More about that some other time.] about the basic picture that you get when you take the Feynman diagrams that he came up with to keep track of terms in the power series involved in quantum electrodynamics, the basic picture you get is you wiggle this charge and out pops a photon from the charge.

Question is, is there an experiment that we can do to test or to validate this model of the single charge radiating? And it turns out there is a very simple experiment, and we can do this experiment right here in this ballroom.

If you hold your hand very steadily right out in front of you and slowly move it until you touch an object, your thigh, your chair, your neighbor, but only with your neighbor’s permission, what happens?

If the single charge radiating model is correct, there’s an issue called the issue of radiation reaction. The moment you started your hand in motion, what would happen is those accelerating charges would accelerate more and more and more and radiate more energy until they collided with the thigh and the result was the entire earth exploding. Well, clearly that didn’t work. There’s a problem with this model.

If you have a point photon emitted from a point charge, the fields act so as to cause more acceleration, which means more radiation, which means more acceleration. You get this exponential runaway. This is a problem that’s acknowledged, for instance, by J.D. Jackson, who wrote the book Classical Electrodynamics, the classic physics textbook on the subject.

So we should have seen an earth-shattering kaboom.

And the question is, where’s the kaboom? Why didn’t we see a kaboom? And the answer is, the single charge radiating model is fundamentally wrong. And you can understand that by reference to Zen Buddhism.

The Zen master Hakuin Ekaku advised his young acolytes to try to listen to the sound of a single hand clapping. Well, we know that’s a nonsense concept. A single hand can’t clap. You have to have two hands in order to clap. And that’s the fundamental problem that’s wrong with the single charge radiating model. It takes two charges to radiate, at least like an equal and opposite charge and a dipole, or you have to have a charge distribution setting up a field to make your single charge radiating. And if you try to consider that system in isolation, you get results every bit as nonsensical as the sound of a single hand clapping.

If you look at the acceleration of a single charge, what you find is if the charge is accelerating, its kinetic energy is increasing. It’s absorbing energy. Or equivalently, it’s a tiny little current segment, and the current’s getting bigger and bigger. It’s got more and more It’s absorbing that magnetic energy. An accelerating charge absorbs energy. It does not emit energy.

The energy that is radiated comes from the fringing fields of the capacitor giving rise to the charge distribution. The radiation fields propagate out through the inward flux of energy. And then only couple to the energy stored in the fringing fields to radiate away. You have to look at the totality of the system to understand what’s going on and not just focus on that single charge and try to model it.

And that’s why we don’t get the earth shattering kaboom… fortunately.

So how could physicists get it so wrong?

Part of the reason is a disdain for philosophical considerations. In fact, Neil deGrasse Tyson a few years ago was interviewed on a podcast, and he said, “the scientist knows when the question, what is the sound of one hand clapping, is a pointless delay.”

Well, it turns out that’s the exact philosophical premise you’ve got to understand to appreciate what’s wrong with a single charge radiating model. But we can go back more fundamentally and take a look at the conventional wisdom.

Correction: I listed Neil deGrasse Tyson (1857–1894). This appears to have been a serious error in my choice of reference frame. I am reliably informed that Tyson was born in 1958 and remains very much among the living. I regret having prematurely consigned him to the history of science.

The Conventional Wisdom

We started with what has been called classical Newtonian certainty as encapsulated in by Pierre Simon Laplace who commented that if only we knew the location of every particle in the universe and all of its velocities and all the forces and accelerations on it, in principle we would be able to know the, have absolute certainty on the unfolding course of events. Well, the discoveries of quantum mechanics and atomic physics in the 1920s suggested that perhaps reality was not causal, that it could not be predicted.

That’s encapsulated here by Heisenberg’s comment that the strict formulation of the law of causality is fundamentally wrong.

What Really Happened?

Well, that happened because the key experiment that was involved there was Michelson and Morley and their work on an interferometer to try to detect the motion of the earth through the ether. They came up with a result.

That was a result that was far less than they would have expected if they were looking at the Earth’s motion. That was explained in terms of electromagnetic theory by a variety of people who followed in his footsteps, culminating in Poincaré, who in 1904 coined the term “principle of relativity,” and he predicted a new mechanics where the speed of light could not be exceeded.

That bottom-up approach to understanding the electrodynamics of moving charges got called into question by a young Swiss patent clerk named Albert Einstein.

He took what’s called an instrumentalist or an operationalist approach influenced by Ernst Mach where he focused on, well, what are the observations and what does the observer see? And he pointed out the observer sees the speed of light being constant and the laws of physics the same in all inertial frames. And he argued that that gave all of the Lorentz transforms and the laws of the motion of a classical charge and that therefore any concept like an aether was completely superfluous and unneeded.

Fast forward 10 years and Einstein is developing the general theory of relativity. John Wheeler commented that you can think of that theory as space-time telling matter how to move and matter telling space-time how to curve.

Curvature of space-time got Einstein thinking and backing away from his purely observation-based approach to physics. He argued in a speech five years later in 1920, space without aether is unthinkable. Somehow space possesses this property of curvature that’s necessary for general relativity to work.

Well, fast forward another five years, and Heisenberg is giving his first lectures on quantum mechanics in Berlin. According to Heisenberg, writing in his memoirs in 1970 or so, 15 years after Einstein’s death, Einstein invited Heisenberg back to his apartment.

And Einstein said, “Well, wait a moment, the electrons have got to be in there somewhere. How do you deal with this?”

And Heisenberg proceeded to quote Einstein back at Einstein on the importance of focusing on observations and how theories should only deal with what the experimental measurements are observing. And according to Heisenberg, Einstein finally conceded and said, “well, perhaps I did use such a philosophy earlier and even wrote it, but it’s all nonsense just the same.”

And that was really Einstein’s break with a conventional Copenhagen interpretation. Of quantum mechanics. But this idea was pretty common. It wasn’t just Einstein who brought the idea into physics. A whole host of his contemporaries all were arguing that causality has nothing to do with the business.

Or that acts of emission absorption of radiation are without direct cause and without direct effect. Or that the causality needs to be abandoned so we don’t fetter the spirit in Spanish boots.

In 1927, the Fifth Solvay Conference, there was a very famous exchange between Einstein and Bohr where Einstein argued that God does not play dice with the universe. And according to legend, Bohr’s response was to tell Einstein to stop telling God what to do. That conflict overshadowed something else that was going on at the time.

A Frenchman named Louis de Broglie had introduced the concept of pilot waves.

His argument was, if you had, say, a two-slit experiment, you had the wave propagated. Propagating through, going through the two slits, setting up an interference pattern, guiding the motion of a particle through one slit or the other slit. It was a deterministic theory of quantum mechanics. Well, that flew in the face of Bohr and the Copenhagen interpretation.

And it was largely rejected, and de Broglie was convinced to abandon that. In 1932, the famous mathematician John von Neumann came up with a mathematical proof that there could be no hidden variables, that a de Broglie-like theory could not possibly be valid. Just a few years later, a mathematician and philosopher named Greta Hermann disproved that, but no one paid any attention to her.

In 1935, Einstein and his colleagues Podolsky and Rosen wrote what came to be known as the EPR paper arguing quantum mechanics is not complete and there had to be hidden variables.

Bohm Revives Pilot Waves

But it wasn’t until the 1950s that another physicist named David Bohm rediscovered and revived the de Broglie pilot wave theory. But unfortunately, he ended up suspected of communist sympathies and fled the country to Brazil to avoid any difficulties involved in that.

So he was at Princeton University at the time, and the head of the Institute for Advanced Studies was this guy, J. Robert Oppenheimer, more famously known as the director of the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer was a big He did not like this pilot wave stuff that Bohm and de Broglie were advocating. So according to the story, he handed a graduate student Bohm’s paper and said, “Don’t come back until you’ve found something wrong with this.”

The graduate student sheepishly came back to Dr. Oppenheimer saying, “I’m sorry, sir, I can’t find anything wrong with this.” So with a sigh, Oppenheimer took it back and decided he’d have to just do it himself.

And he couldn’t find anything wrong with it, either.

So he convened a seminar at the Institute for Advanced Studies to assemble all the best and brightest minds at Princeton to finally put a stake through the heart of this heretical pilot wave causal theory of quantum mechanics. And at the end of the day, no one could find a technical flaw or reason to disprove the theory.

So according to one of the participants, Oppenheimer said, “Well, if we can’t refute Bohm, we’re just going to have to agree to ignore him.”

And you hear a story like that and that doesn’t sound like the way you’d expect scientists to be behaving.

And I’d have been kind of skeptical of that story too, if I hadn’t had a front row eyewitness opportunity to see something similar. When I studied physics down the road here at the University of Texas at Austin, I had the good fortune to have John Wheeler on my doctoral committee.

He had studied with Bohr. In addition to coining the term “black hole,” he did pioneering work in quantum measurement theory. So when I was befuddled by the whole Copenhagen approach to quantum mechanics that I learned in graduate school, and I finally discovered the pilot wave approach that made so much more intuitive sense, I took the opportunity to talk with Professor Wheeler about it. And I asked Professor Wheeler, “What do you think of this pilot wave approach to quantum mechanics?”

And he said, “AH! The screwdriver theory of physics.”

And I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that, although it was obviously pretty derogatory. And so I asked him, well, have you written a paper or analysis? Is there someplace I can go to understand what your criticisms are and why you don’t like this approach to quantum mechanics?

And he looked at me and he said, “You know, I never really studied into that business and I really should so I can see what’s wrong with it.”

It was amazing to me that Wheeler would have that kind of an attitude, the blinders… he never seriously engaged with or tried to understand this fundamental alternative to quantum mechanics.

I discussed my experiences with John Wheeler, in this post.

And it really wasn’t until decades later that I realized the significance of this.

And in fact, the Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann commented, Niels Bohr brainwashed a whole generation of theorists into thinking that the Copenhagen Interpretation was the last word in understanding quantum mechanics.

Theory-Practice Divide

Now, there’s another issue here, not just the philosophical issues and the prejudices and blinders that people put on. There’s an issue of the theory-practice divide. I saw a wonderful example of this very recently. A hairdresser in Baltimore named Janet Stevens was in a museum looking at Roman busts. And she saw a bust like this, and she saw the little card about how this is a bust of a Roman matron wearing a wig. And she took a look at that and she said, “That’s not a wig. That’s an actual hairstyle. It’s very elaborate, but it’s an actual hairstyle.”

So she did a lot of research. She identified mistranslations of Latin. She recreated the hairstyles using plausible sewing techniques, showing that they could be done in a reasonable amount of time. And ultimately, she was able to validate her ideas and publish an article showing that, yes, in fact, that was an actual hairstyle and not a wig that was on the statue.

Well, that brings us back to the problem with physics. Because 80 years ago, this is the book: Electromagnetic Theory by Julius Adam Stratton. This was the bible of electromagnetism. The electrical engineers at MIT’s Rad Lab developing radar and the physicists at the Manhattan Project building the bomb: this was the book that they got their electromagnetism out of.

And it’s full, if you look at the table of contents, full of a lot of very practical, everyday, real world applied electromagnetic problems and considerations. Well, fast forward another 50 years or so to when I was in grad school.

And this was the book that we used. Jackson’s Classical Electrodynamics. This is a second edition. It’s a blue third edition for the youngsters taking this class nowadays.

And if you do a side-by-side comparison of the applied topics in Stratton to the applied topics in Jackson, you discover that today’s physicists are taught a dumbed down and atrophied version of the applied physics that was in Stratton in 1941. And it’s worse because they don’t even bother including any of the more modern things like Smith charts and impedance matching and electrically small antenna concepts. There’s been a complete separation, a division between theory and practice.

How Fields & Energy Fix Physics

So facing that problem, what I want to talk about is how the “Fields & Energy” approach tends to fix this problem in physics.

Dirac’s Big Mistake

And I’m going to begin by going back to a train platform in Stockholm in 1933. You see here Dirac and Heisenberg and Schrodinger and two of their mothers and one of their wives standing on the platform.

Dirac was one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics. Feynman commented, everyone reads Schiff, the leading graduate textbook, but they quote Dirac when they want to say something important. And Dirac, in this book, his Principles of Quantum Mechanics, had a long analysis of why two photons could never, ever interfere with each other.

And again, I’ll spare you the wall of text. The basic idea is, he said, look, you got two photons coming together. If they add up constructively, you double the field. But the energy goes as the square of the field. So you have four times the energy. That violates conservation of energy.

Therefore, two photons can never interfere with each other. And similarly, in a destructive interference, you’re canceling out the fields. The energy goes to zero. Again, you violate conservation of energy, so two photons can never interfere constructively or destructively with each other.

And it wasn’t just Dirac who came to that conclusion. You can see Heisenberg said more or less the same thing in his textbook in 1930.

How Electromagnetic Waves REALLY Interfere

Well, let’s take a look at that and use some of our basic right-hand rule, electricity and magnetism, if we can remember that from our undergraduate days, and consider a small forward wave and a small reverse wave in constructive interference.

Of course, we define interference with respect to the electric field. When they come together, yes, we’re going to get twice the field, and we’re going to have four times the electric energy.

But notice what happened to the magnetic field. When we reinforce the electric field, we are canceling out the magnetic field. And remember, going back to Heaviside’s great discovery, there is a balance of electric and magnetic energy in the wave. So what’s happened is we’ve canceled out the magnetic field. All of that original magnetic energy has become electric energy. So energy conservation is satisfied. It’s just a transformation of the original balance of electric and magnetic energy in the moving wave to purely electrostatic when we have a constructive interference.

And similarly, if we look at a destructive interference, yes, the electric fields are going to cancel out.

But look what happens to the magnetic fields. They double, they reinforce, that balance has shifted to be all entirely magnetic energy.

Now, I have to put some equations in here or they’ll revoke my PhD.

The Great Circle of Electromagnetism

But what I want you to note here is how you can use microwave impedance electrical engineering type approaches to the problem to understand this in a very simple way.

If you take the energy velocity that was pioneered by Heaviside and take a parameter that physicists use called the Lagrangian. The Lagrangian is basically the difference in the electric versus the magnetic energy. We normalize the energy velocity with respect to the speed of light, and we normalize the Lagrangian with respect to the energy density. That gives us two parameters. The normalized energy velocity goes from minus one to plus one, moving backwards or forwards at the speed of light, and zero would be stationary. The normalized Lagrangian tells us the balance of electric to magnetic energy. Plus one would be all electric, zero would be a balance, and minus one would be all magnetic.

The fascinating thing is, if we square and sum those two quantities, ell squared plus eta squared, it’s equal to one. And that is the equation of a unit circle. So this unit circle describes how a 1D wave will work. We start with a forward wave. If we come to an open, say, the energy becomes all electrostatic, turns around and goes in the opposite direction. In the reflection, we have the reverse wave.

Or if it interacts with a short, it goes the other way around the circle. It becomes purely magnetostatic and then becomes a reverse wave. And you can see all of this math is in my paper, “Energy, Velocity, and Reactive Fields,” if you want to go into it in more detail.

But of course, this should raise an immediate question, wait a moment, electrostatic and magnetostatic?

Static… we’re talking about energy not moving, being associated with fields that are moving at the speed of light. How can that be? Well, the reason is that the energy is slowing, stopping, and changing direction. The fields, when they interact with each other, are exchanging energy with each other.

How Electromagnetic Waves Interact

So we start with two waves moving down a transmission line, mirror image waves. The axes are scaled, so the speed of light is at a 45-degree angle.

We end up with the two lobes of the forward wave interacting. We’re interacting with the two lobes of the reverse wave. Initially, the two goes-up lobes align and we get an electrostatic node.

As the waves are perfectly aligned, they cancel out and we have two magnetostatic nodes.

And then as they begin to separate, the two goes-down lobes add up and we get an electrostatic node.

The two waves pass through each other at the speed of light, but the energy bounces. It’s exchanged from one wave to another through these interferences.

How Sine Waves Interact

We can look at sine waves the same way.

If you take a look at a forward wave moving at the speed of light…

…and an equal and opposite reverse wave moving at the speed of light. If the VSWR is infinite, if you’re hooked to an open or a short, you get an equal and opposite reverse wave.

What you discover is the energy is oscillating every quarter period, a quarter wavelength between electrostatic and magnetostatic nulls.

So we have the waves moving at the speed of light and the energy oscillating a quarter wavelength one way or the other.

Different phenomenon, different behavior.

We can make one wave a little bigger…

…than the other…

and we’ll see a little bit of a net forward progression.

The larger forward wave dominates the reverse wave. We get a little bit of energy flow in the forward direction, but it’s at a speed that’s slower than the speed of light.

So again, different paths, different space-time behaviors.

How Antennas Work

If we look at the radiation of an antenna, we have from a small dipole energy oscillating in and out.

Each oscillation, when we have a field that radiates away at a given point…

…the energy associated with it started close to that dipole.

And with each oscillation, it gets pushed to another layer of the onion of energy around that dipole until finally it’s in the outermost layer and it couples to a field and gets radiated away into the far field.

Right-Hand Rule for Radiation

We can take a look at a right-hand rule for radiation. And I’m amazed that this isn’t something that I was taught, say, as a freshman studying physics. We’re all familiar with the current going in the direction of our thumb and the induction field in the direction of our fingers. That’s the IEEE logo that’s out there in the hallway.

But it’s the same geometry for the radiation component of the magnetic field if we put our thumb in the direction that the current is changing. So for instance, if we have an exponential decay, We make a capacitor and we discharge it through a resistor. We have a current going down, giving us an induction field, and that current is decaying, so the I dot is in the opposite direction, giving us a radiation field. Somewhere in between there, there’s a circle where the magnetic field has to go to zero.

There is a bubble around this exponential decay, a bubble whose radius is the speed of light times the time constant, where the magnetic field goes to zero. No energy passes through that sphere.

And in fact, if you take a look, at the total integrated radiation power that comes off of that exponential decay, it is exactly equal to the static field energy that was stored outside that bubble. So the radiation fields are propagating out through the inward flux of energy through that bubble. They couple to the static field energy and radiate away.

Another example that’s tough to explain, from the “single charge radiating” model…

If you take two orthogonal antennas and feed them in quadrature, this is something antenna engineers do to create a quasi-isotropic antenna pattern. And if you study the energy flow, If you find it comes off on a tangent line lambda over pi away from the source itself.

So, if you use direction finding equipment for instance, you’ll discover the bearing you get is offset from the actual source by lambda over pi. I discovered it, only to find that it had previously been discovered back in the 1960s by Henry Kalmas, who was an army engineer, and he also used it to make a location system.

So, this is an example of, you know, if we have science that is repeatable enough and predictable enough to make practical use of it, the term we have for that is engineering. So, this is an engineering example of how energy flow works in a real world system.

A New Paradigm

So, this brings us to a new paradigm of how electricity and magnetism works.

The conventional view is electromagnetism is due to one entity we call a photon. And that photon somehow simultaneously combines the mutually contradictory properties of being a localized particle and a non-localized distributed wave.

In my view, the “Fields & Energy” view, it’s due to two entities, wave-like fields that guide the flow of particle-like energy. And I’d like to be able to take credit for that, but you can go back to a wonderful paper by Wunscher, Hauptmann and Herrmann in 2002, where they pointed out the basic rules of how fields work versus energy.

For instance, energy flow lines have to begin on sources and end on absorbers. They have to run parallel to reflecting surfaces if nothing is being absorbed or emitted. And energy flow lines never cross. It’s a vector field. A vector can’t point in two directions at any given point.

In fact, that idea was actually first enunciated back in 1984 by the famed Columbia paraphysicist Egon Spengler who commented, “Don’t cross the streams!”

And that relationship, “Spengler’s Law,” I got past the peer reviewers. So that is a peer-reviewed term for this phenomenon.

How Fields & Energy Interact

So, I took NEC [Numerical Electromagnetic Code] and I did some very simple analyses of how this all works, generating a NEC plot of the fields and the energy flow, and then I can give you some comparisons. So, I have this array generating a beam, and you can see all the energy, nice and neat and uniform in the beam.

A little bit of side-swiping and exchanging of energy between the side lobes there in the upper corner.

You bounce it off a ground plane and yes, the energy flow is parallel to the ground plane.

The fields are bouncing off the ground plane, the energy flow is parallel to the ground plane.

You can take a look at that 60-degree reflector example that Wunscher et al. Gave. And you get something similar.

In this case, I have a real-world beam that actually diverges as it progresses. So you don’t get the pure whirlpool in the middle, but you can see something qualitatively similar.

This is an example with an elliptical reflector. Put a source at one focus of a quarter elliptical reflector. And you can see, from a field perspective, you would think the energy flows off, say, in the four o’clock direction.

From an energy perspective, you see it’s actually coming off at maybe the two o’clock direction, interacting with the reflected wave from the reflector, and then only ultimately in the far field, ending up in the four o’clock direction.

We can take two beams and see how they interfere with each other with two separate arrays.

We get that interference pattern since these are co-polarized, but there’s a line between those two equal and opposite beams where no energy flow goes through.

The two beams are exchanging energy.

We can make one beam a little larger and we get that same predicted behavior.

The larger beam sheds enough energy to reconstitute the weaker beam and it absorbs the energy of the weaker beam as they separate and move away.

If they’re cross-polarized, there are fewer reflections, and you get an even cleaner and neater picture of this phenomenon, of the two beams exchanging energy…

…or a larger beam interacting with a weaker beam.

Antenna Applications

This has been used in antenna theory since at least the 1950s, when Schelkunoff and Friis tracked the energy flow along a quarter-wave dipole element to show how it behaved.

There’s an excellent book by Landstorfer and Sacher, Optimization of Wire Antennas where they show how you have energy from a three-quarter wavelength monopole bouncing between a high main lobe and the ground lobe. You’d like to have a low angle of elevation on your radiation.

They came up with a way to optimize it in that Landstorfer monopole to get a nice smooth monotonic flow of energy coming out close to the ground.

And of course, it also helps you understand how antennas work, how a little tiny antenna can capture a much bigger part of the incoming wave than you would expect from its actual physical size.

The reflected wave interferes with the incident wave to guide energy into that little antenna.

And this is still being used, for instance, by my colleague Junming Yao at Mississippi State University, where he’s using that to show how reflector antennas pick up energy and what the effective aperture is and how the energy flows around parabolic and planar reflectors work.

Connecting Antenna Physics & Quantum Physics

An excellent example of this disconnect between physics and engineering is just in the last year I realized I don’t think anyone has ever taken a look at the hydrogen atom to see if it corresponds to the rules we all know for electrically small antennas.

And it turns out they do.

And apparently physicists are unfamiliar with how electrically small antenna limits like Chew Harrington work.

And engineers aren’t necessarily familiar with decay times and Einstein coefficients.

You put the two together, and you can show that atomic processes obey the Chu-Harrington limit.

So, there’s a lot of talk about quantum antennas and sensors having miraculously better performance than conventional systems, but they obey the same conventional rules.

So, I’ve talked about how Fields & Energy fix physics in my view, how you have these two pictures of waves propagating through, you can treat them optically like rays, and how they give rise to a different picture where you can track the flow of energy through your system and give you another perspective on things.

So, when I take a look at an energy flow perspective of how energy works in an electromagnetic system from two tiny apertures, and I compare that to the quantum mechanical predictions of the pilot wave trajectories from pilot wave quantum mechanics, I take a look at those two pictures, and in the words of the internet meme, I think they’re the same picture.

I think that the pilot wave approach is the logical consequence of applying electromagnetic energy flow relationships to how light and how photons and energy move in our electromagnetic systems.

John Wheeler, writing a few years before I knew him in his book, Journey into Gravity and Space-Time, said, “Someday surely we will see the principal underlying existence as so simple, so beautiful, and so obvious that we will all say to each other, how could we have been so blind so long?”

I hope this “Fields & Energy” perspective helps bring us closer to that day.

So in summary, I’ve talked about fundamentals and origins of electromagnetism and walked through where physics went wrong and how electromagnetism and quantum mechanics work.

If you’re interested in this, I can recommend my book, Fields & Energy.

The contents of Book 1 and most of the contents of Book 2, which has not yet been released, are available on my Substack at aetherczar.substack.com.

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I have a bunch of references there…

…and I’ll put up the slides when I get a chance to get back home and organize them. Hopefully the video of this talk also [And here they are, two weeks later!].

And if you’re interested in exploring these ideas further, we’re holding the Heaviside Symposium at the Signals Museum in Huntsville, Alabama, MLK Day weekend.

I hope I’ll be seeing some of you there.

And I’ll be happy to take any questions that you have.

Enjoyed the lecture, but maybe not quite enough to spring for a paid subscription?Then click on the button below to buy me a coffee. Thanks!

Questions & Answers

Benoit: Let’s thank the speaker first for a brilliant keynote. Thank you, Hans. So, great timing. We have time for questions. Who wants to raise a question to Hans? Okay, Chuck, coming with the mic for you.

Chuck: Great conversation. Thanks so much for your talk today. When I was in grad school, I studied under Dr. Bessiere, who was one of my professors at Virginia Tech, and I had to do a paper on the Aharonov-Bohm effect, where it was trying to provide a physical kind of effect?

Hans: Yes, it is the same Bohm. The question is about the Aharonov-Bohm Effect.

That Bohm is the same Bohm who did the revitalization of the pilot wave theory. The basic idea is they have two slits and they run electrons through the slit, but they put a solenoid in between the two. That is confining magnetic fields. And what they discover is in the mathematical representation of… I guess it’s the Schrodinger equation they use for that… there is a term where you’re looking at the magnetic vector potential A and how it interacts and causes phase shifts in the electron trajectories. And that is an observed phenomenon.

And my question about that was always, well, wait a moment. Yeah, solenoids confines magnetic flux, but there’s an equal and opposite amount of flux coming out that’s distributed somewhere. And I wasn’t really happy with the experiments that I saw on that.

Turns out in the 1980s there was a marvelous experiment done by a Japanese researcher, I’m very sorry I don’t remember his name, where he took a small toroidal magnet and plated it in a superconducting material. To a high degree of confidence, closing all the magnetic fields in there and discovered that, yes, the electron beam going through the center of that toroid did show an offset.

Note: Tonomura, A. et al. (1986). Evidence for Aharonov–Bohm effect with magnetic field completely shielded from electron wave. Physical Review Letters, 56(8), 792–795.

So it does seem to be a real thing. It is very intriguing. It suggests that the potential is not just a tool, a mathematical tool for calculating fields, that it has some physical, real-world influence.

So excellent question. Thank you.

Benoit: More questions. And we need to challenge Hans to see if we can find one question he cannot answer.

Question: First of all, thanks for the great question. And I have a question. You see one slide talking about the two waveforms. Something that’s crossed over. Some kind of bounce back. Why is that?

Hans: The two waveforms that are...

Question: ...interference with each other. [Indistinct].

Hans: Yeah, what’s happening is basically the fields pass through each other at the speed of light.

But if you take a look at how they interfere with each other, you’re getting places where you have electrostatic or magnetostatic energy. The energy velocity is actually slowing down. And when you look at the big picture of that system of how that works, you have energy being exchanged between the two beams. So, fundamentally, we like to think of, well, for instance, if you, as engineers, if we want to understand a cell phone and how that cell phone works, what we’ll do is we’ll say, okay, I’ve got a direct ray to the cell phone tower. Maybe I’ve got a multipath bounce. Those are the two principal components.

Say I’m in an open field and I add them up. I get the sum and the phase difference and that predicts the link and I can predict exactly how much power I have at the other side of the link. And that’s good for an engineering calculation.

But if you step back and ask yourself what’s really going on in reality, you have to keep in mind there is a kilowatt per square meter of electromagnetic energy coming down from the sun. And in thermal equilibrium, an equal and opposite amount of electromagnetic energy of infrared electromagnetism coming up from the ground.

And what happens is that little tiny tickle of a cell phone signal is going through those vastly greater flows. Whatever energy is in it is very quickly going to get swept away. That little tickle of a cell phone signal radiates through there and somewhere near the receive antenna it captures and bumps a little bit of whatever energy it happens to find into the receive antenna.

So it’s a completely, the “Fields & Energy” approach is a completely different way of looking at a system. Now there, hey, it’s much easier. Just take the two rays, add them up, and do the calculation.

But if you want to ask yourself physically what’s really happening in the real world system, you’d have a picture more like that, you know, those energy forms.

Question: Showing the energy.

Hans: Showing what?

Question: The energy, energy, energy. Energy, not the EM here.

Hans: Yeah, this is the plot. Well, the plot on the left is showing the, I think, the electric field intensity, and the plot on the right is showing the energy density.

Question: Ah, okay. So, one more curve, can you go to the other one? It can have a challenge somewhere for... How they...

Hans: This is when they’re co-polarized, so we get a lot of interferences and nodes.

Question: Some just crossing each other, not a reflection wave.

Hans: Oh, the question is, why can’t we just have two flows crossing each other?

Question: I see some picture has crossed each other. In the early slide, probably.

Hans: There are some that may look like they’re crossing, but when you do a detailed analysis, they’re not.

Benoit: I think maybe the question is between this picture and the other one, and the difference is here you have an unbalanced distribution of the energy, right? There is one smaller beam.

Hans: Right, one beam is weaker than the other here.

Benoit: One beam is weaker than the other, and somehow then there is a kind of crossing of energy because there is one beam that has sort of a dominant Take on the energy, right?

Hans: Right. The stronger beam is basically capturing all the energy from the weaker beam here.

Benoit: Exactly. And when they are identical, then you have sort of, and they look like bouncing back, right? Yes. Because there is this causality or causal surface, I don’t know how you call it exactly.

Hans: And in fact, a good way of thinking about this is image theory. In image theory, we want to understand how a source interacts with a ground plane.

So we put a virtual equal and opposite source on the other side, we add them up, we get the solution, and that gives us the boundary condition for the ground plane where the fields are bouncing off it and there’s no energy there.

Well, let’s remove the ground plane and put an actual equal and opposite source. We have the exact same math, the exact same calculation, the exact same no energy is going through the plane.

I argue it has the same interpretation that the energy is bouncing off the virtual ground plane that’s set up by that equal and opposite source.

Benoit: Any more questions? We have time for a couple more.

I start here in the middle.

Question: So, I work currently on an open source full-weight software. But before this, I worked at Thomas, where I made ray-rich demo systems. And I was trained by someone who worked there for 40 years. And he taught me that a good engineer needs to be able to switch between thinking in fields and thinking in transmissionary models.

But I would love to also ask. So I’m wondering, is there anything more magic to this than just essentially looking at streamline plots on the pointing vector kit? Or is there extra processing to see how these feeds? Because I’d love to apply it to like a Yagi-Uda antenna, because that’s a fascinating case of it’s somehow capturing with the first directrix and the energy sort of flowing back into it. I’d love to visualize things to see when I make it that is what happens.

Hans: Yeah, that goes back to my first comment about how valuable it is to have multiple models. I mean, this isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution that’s going to solve all your engineering problems. It is another tool to put in your box, along with your field thinking, along with your transmission line thinking, and... So forth.

What I’ve used it for is looking at energy flow streamlines around ideal dipoles and I used that to design ultra-wideband antennas because I wanted to design antennas that did not support the reactive concentrations of energy that narrow the bandwidth and accommodate themselves to the ideal streamflow lines of energy radiating out.

It turns out that gives you a lot of the common shapes that other people had already used, but there were a few in there that were novel, that I was able to invent and ended up doing some of the first commercial ultra-wideband antennas for Time Domain Corporation. It also proved very useful in understanding near fields.

This is probably the application of most interest in the EMC arena. Because when I started doing near-field wireless systems, you need a link law. And Friis’ law assumes everything’s far-field. So by using the energy flow characteristics from small dipole antennas, I ended up figuring out how to do it.

And in fact, I can tell you, if you are trying to certify a Part 15 device to the FCC rules, they assume all antennas are operating in the far field, even when you’re in the far field. So by making a clever selection between electric versus magnetic antennas, you can buy yourself 20 dB or more of extra margin depending on how you conduct the same test according to the officially sanctioned rules. Which is a problem I did not want to call attention to while my livelihood depended on making systems in case they changed them in some way that would make all of our products obsolete.

But paying attention to how near fields work, how you have a balance of energy in the far field, but then as you are close to a source, whether that’s an antenna or a source of interference, you know you can’t count on finding the interference if you use just a magnetic probe or just an electric probe.

You really need to look at both because it could be either.

Question: Is it the streamlines of the Poynting vector or do you need some extra information?

Hans: It’s all in the Poynting vector. The tricky part is taking the field of Poynting vectors and connecting them with streamflow lines. In fact, in the plots that I show, Mathematica, which is what I use to generate them, It wouldn’t give me physically… I wanted streamflow lines where they all started as source. And it would just take random parts out in the side lobe and start something in the middle and track the flow of energy in the side lobe. So I haven’t figured out a good way to do really good valid streamflow lines.

I’ll add that it’s also helpful to keep track of the value of the normalized Lagrangian so you can see where you have balanced energy moving at the speed of light or a concentration of electrostatic or magnetostatic energy from an interference of some kind. Sarkar and Antar have done some wonderful work along these lines.

Benoit: I’m going to take one final question. Oh, he answered your question.

Hans: Up front here?

Benoit: Okay. Well, I’m going to take two final questions then. And then we’ll go.

Question: You mentioned the right-hand rule works for radiated fields? Can RC modeled ESD events have a magnetic sphere that is concentrated a particular point and differ between air discharge versus direct discharge events?

Hans: I don’t know the answer to that. I mean, certainly whenever you have a discharge event and you have something that’s roughly approximating an exponential decay, you’re going to get that kind of behavior where the magnetic field is going to cancel out. In fact, this has been observed in lightning studies, for instance.

Benoit: Thank you. And last question.

Question: Do I understand correctly that this point inductor flow lines applies to the time averaged point inductor field? Time independent. Time independent averaged in the sense that it becomes time independent.

Hans: Yeah, I’m using a couple different kinds of analysis. Like when you take a look at the one interesting thing, and I did this in the philosophical transactions paper on energy, velocity, and reactive fields. The impedance of the exponential decay turns out to be time invariant. Even though the electric and magnetic fields are both decaying, they’re decaying in sync with each other, so you have a constant map of the impedance through this arena. So doing the time domain approach gives you a really good picture of the evolution of a system. But when you start doing things like, you’re taking a look at, this is a time average point.

So there’s other stuff going on that is tough to capture outside of an animation if you want to see it. So yeah, you really have to use both the time-dependent form to get the minor details of how things are behaving, and then the time-average form gives you the big picture.

And the plots that I was showing later on are all showing time-average behavior from sinusoidal sources.

Question: Yes, some time ago I had a publication where I looked at instantaneous fields, of this field, of the back, of the back field, and they look completely different than the time average field. They can, yes. Yes, and do you have any thoughts about physical interpretation of those projections?

Hans: Well, I do think that along with Maxwell, Heaviside, and Poynting, I do think that it reflects a real flow of energy that can be stored in empty space around our electromagnetic systems. And by tracking that flow, you can gain insights that are of use to practical problems.

Question: That’s what I tried to do, but unfortunately I couldn’t find a good interpretation of what I can calculate.

Benoit: Thank you. Maybe it’s a good discussion to continue during the break and during the rest of the day. I want to thank again the speaker Hans for a great talk and great answer to all these questions and thank the audience. Thank you everyone. Thank you. And I have a coin for you.

That’s all for now. Remember always to keep calm, and make physics great again.

More soon,

Hans

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His recent work explores deep connections between classical electromagnetism, quantum limits, and the physical foundations of radiation, with an emphasis on restoring conceptual clarity and unifying principles across physics and engineering. As a science fiction writer, he brings a storyteller’s eye to his technical writing. Dr. Schantz earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1995 for his theoretical study of how dipoles convert bound or reactive energy into radiation.

In this episode we discuss electromagnetism, Albert Einstein an accurate account of his life and where physics has lost its way.

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Think differently... The Fair Food Forager & Friends show is a guest / interview based show on health, history, environment, geopolitics, esoteric, taboo and sometimes mind blowing, informative chats with anyone questioning the accepted narrative. Things the mainstream just won't talk about.

The auto-generate transcript has only been lightly edited, so the usual caveats apply.

Transcript

Hans: Anyone who has lived through the last decade or so with their eyes open has gotten quite the education in how people attempt to twist reality to serve their own purposes. Certainly that has been going on for as long as history. I particularly appreciate Robert Frederick’s treatment of Francis Bacon.

I was familiar with a lot of the basics of Francis Bacon and particularly his influence on science. But Robert Frederick opened my eyes to how that was just one small part of a much larger kind of program for world domination of the British Empire. So when you go back and take a look at the history of science, you can see how certain scientists have been promoted for better or worse, to serve other people’s agendas. Everyone wanted their own nation’s scientists to be acclaimed, the best and brightest and savviest of all the scientists in the world. And those rivalries led to a lot of skullduggery taking place in the background that only accidentally comes to light even centuries after the events.

Paul: Welcome to the Fair Food Forager and Friends Show, a podcast discussing health, science, environment, wellbeing, geopolitics and thought-provoking, sometimes esoteric, outside of the mundane ideas. We’ll hear from doctors who have removed themselves from Rockefeller Medicine, authors and researchers going above and beyond the mainstream narrative. Ideas that we should all feel free to at the very least contemplate. Come with me and broaden our knowledge. Here’s some alternate views and let’s make up our own minds. This podcast is brought to you by the Fair Food Forager app, the world’s only ethical social media and local food directory. An app that is above all allowing for the possibility to reduce waste, find healthy real foods, while also supporting small business. And that is something we all need to be doing right now. Hello and welcome to this week’s conversation with Hans Schantz on some brain-twisting physics. Without further ado, let’s hear from Hans.

Paul: Hans G. Schantz, welcome to the podcast.

Hans: Well, thank you so much for having me on.

Paul: We were introduced by Robert Frederick, and I’ve just done a couple more podcasts with him on Shakesbacon, as he calls him. And then I listened to some of your podcasts and talking about physics. And you’re also an author of fiction and nonfiction. But I guess, yeah, let’s start there. What’s your story?

Hans: my story is I started off in industrial engineering because I wanted to be an entrepreneur and run my own business. I very quickly realized that if I was going to run my own business, I probably needed to invent some product that I’d be able to sell. That got me into physics. And before I knew it, I had graduated with a PhD in theoretical electromagnetism.

I very quickly realized that there is a vast difference between what physicists do for electromagnetism and the practical everyday electromagnetism that electrical engineers do. So, a few more years of study on top of the PhD and I finally landed my first job as an ultra-wideband antenna designer. That married my interest in understanding the evolution and time Domain Behavior of Electromagnetic Fields with my physics interest in energy flow and understanding how radiation works and finding a way to put it in a practical application.

I went on to found a company called Q-Track where my business partners and I went to the opposite end of the spectrum and we used very low-frequency, long-wavelength signals exploiting their near-field properties to make very precise indoor location systems that worked around clutter. My company, Q-Track, was acquired a few years back and I came along with the acquisition and since then I’ve been working in the defense RF radar world. While I was doing the startup at Q-Track, I started writing my first book on ultra-wideband antennas. It’s in a second edition now.

After I finished the second edition of the book, I was really tired of equations and references, so I ended up taking a break by writing fiction, and that was the first book of my Hidden Truth series.

It’s a science fiction alternate history techno-thriller about an evil conspiracy trying to take over the world that was kind of tongue-in-cheek when I was writing it 10 years ago, but a lot of what I thought were gross exaggerations and parodies have a lot of relevance today.

I also wrote a novel called The Wise of Heart, bringing the Scopes Monkey Trial up to date and, you know, flipping the script and making it about transgenderism instead of about evolution.

And my most recent project is I’m taking all of the ideas that I’ve developed over a career working in wireless electromagnetism and RF about how electromagnetism works. The fundamental idea is the conventional wisdom holds that electromagnetism is due to one thing, a photon, that is simultaneously a localized particle and a non-localized wave. Well, I think those are mutually contradictory and paradoxical properties. I think electromagnetism is due to two things. I think it’s due to fields that are non-local and behave like waves and guide the flow of energy, which in the quantum limit looks like particles. It’s a strictly classical electromagnetic Worldview that builds on the insights of people like Poynting and Heaviside and Hertz. But interestingly enough, it ties in nicely with the pilot wave theory of quantum mechanics, an interpretation that’s widely neglected.

I decided, after having a lot of difficulty getting my ideas in journals and in professional circles, that the best way to promote my ideas was to write books at an introductory level for Advanced High School Students or Undergraduates who are just interested in how electromagnetism works. That kicked off my Fields & Energy project. The first book, Fundamentals and Origins of Electromagnetism, is on Amazon. The second book, Second book will be Where Physics Went Wrong. Most of that content is already on my Substack. And then the final book is How Electromagnetism and Quantum Mechanics Work. So I’m serializing that trilogy on my Substack at aetherczar.substack.com.

So that in brief is my story.

Paul: So when you think of, you mentioned antenna, so from somebody who understands basically nothing about physics, you know, we hear about Newton and Einstein and this sort of thing, but in the modern world, so something like a mobile phone is emitting radiation and you’re looking at how that EMF moves through the ether, is that basically what we would think about in the modern day?

Hans: Basically, yes. An electromagnetic wave is really two waves in one. It’s an electric wave working together with a magnetic wave. And those two waves have fields that are at right angles to each other. And then mutually perpendicular is the flow of the energy that they’re guiding.

So in the context of a cell phone, we would look at the signal that it’s radiated and be able to understand the flow of energy. And interestingly, the conventional perspective on that would be to look just at what the cell phone is doing. In my interpretation, I think that although you can break down electromagnetic systems to consider individual fields like the transmitted field from the cell phone, that really there’s just one electromagnetic field and that field is competing with all of all of the other fields, the infrared heat, the sunshine, the other radio waves to guide the flow of energy. So I think energy takes a much more complicated path through real-world systems than the simplistic, you know, signal goes straight from the cell phone to the tower kind of picture.

Paul: If they bring in something like 6G, That’s basically saying that are those waves then getting tighter and tighter, the waves are closer together, and then so they can pass through more things? Is that basically how it works? So the slower and the wider the band, it wouldn’t be able to pass through a brick wall. Is that how we would understand it?

Hans: Well, it depends. You’re right. 6G is envisioning using typically millimeter wave and very short wavelengths at very high frequencies compared to ordinary microwave-ish kinds of cell phone signals. But actually that tends to make them less penetrating. It’s the longer wavelength signals that will penetrate through the walls and into buildings. But the problem is at those lower frequencies there’s not enough bandwidth to send a lot of data. So in order to meet all of the data mobility needs of all of the cell phone customers who want to stream videos over their cell phones in urban areas, What RF engineers have had to do is move up to those higher frequencies, even though the propagation isn’t as good, but they have to have a lot of different signals going on at the same time.

So the idea there is those short wavelengths let them focus a personalized beam of energy to your phone to send the data. But it really is not as... It’s not as penetrating as the more conventional lower frequency signals would be. And as you said, it’s competing with everything as well. So we have so much technology around us that’s emitting these beams. And then, as you said, there’s light and sunlight. And yeah, how does it not get confused in... Yeah, that’s something, see, when a physicist tries to understand, or when an engineer tries to understand a cell phone and look at the signal that the cell phone emits, the engineer will take a look at that signal and will calculate the distance, and maybe there’s a second bounce version of that signal called multipath that’s taking some different paths through the environment, add them all up, Calculate all their contributions Work out what the received signal will look like at the cell phone tower And then it’s game over Wash your hands, move on to the next problem.

But what’s really happening is The signal from your cell phone is actually pretty weak compared to all of the other signals that are present in your environment. Like, your cell phone is transmitting with a power of a few hundred milliwatts of RF power. The sun, on the other hand, is beaming down with about a kilowatt So it has vastly larger, stronger fields and power flows. So in my vision or my picture of electromagnetism, what’s happening is that little tiny ripple of a cell phone signal is... Moving out into the sunshine and whatever energy it originally was guiding or carrying is ripped away by the much stronger fields of the sunshine. And only once it gets near the cell phone tower does that little ripple of a cell phone signal perturb or bump some of the energy it finds in the local environment in order to get it into the receive antennae.

So, in my view, fields and energy are two different things. They take different paths through the system, and the energy that a field ends up with at a receiver is not necessarily the energy it starts with at the transmitter.

Paul: I’ve also heard you talk about you worked with antenna and you were playing around with the thickness of the antenna. How does that play a role? Because some of this technology, you can’t even see the antenna. So it’s tiny and inside. So if you were playing around with the thickness, is this technology that’s still used, but it’s on a tiny scale now?

Hans: What they typically do in, I mean, the older cell phones you may remember had a little stubby whip or protrusion coming out of the top of the cell phones. They’ve gotten very clever about how they get the cell phone to radiate. What you’ll normally find in a cell phone is little patch antennas on the back of the cell phone. And they are designed to excite Electromagnetic Modes on Your Cell Phone to pretty much turn your entire cell phone into an antenna at the right frequency. It’s really kind of amazing how they’re able to pull that off, and it’s no longer a a one-size-fits-all kind of solution when you’re designing an antenna for a small device. You almost have to design it on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the size of the device and how you’re imagining someone’s going to hold it and what impact it’s going to have on the hand and on the head that it might be held next to. And of course, there’s a concern about trying to make sure the device doesn’t radiate an excessive amount of power into your skull or into your hand as you’re holding it.

Paul: Yeah, I was going to ask if people say that we also emit a frequency as well. So is our frequency either being impacted or confusing the other frequencies that are flying around?

Hans: Well, that’s an interesting question. If you’d asked me that 10 years ago, I’d have given you the conventional RF party line about how Albert Einstein proved cell phones can’t cause cancer because... He demonstrated through his work on the photoelectric effect that you have to have a photon of a certain energy in order to have enough energy to modify the chemical structure of DNA and possibly cause cancer.

That’s why ultraviolet rays can give you sunburns and why x-rays or gamma rays, yes, they can cause cancer. But for RF and wireless from cell phones, from your data networks and radio stations and so forth, the thing you have to worry about is just heat. And the way they set up that standard is they went back to take a look at how the sun works.

A kilowatt per square meter, you can go out in the sun and it might be a little hot, but your body is capable of dissipating that amount of heat that’s being beamed down on you. So the threshold for RF safety is they want to make sure your cell phone or your microwave oven or radio station isn’t going to heat you up any more than a sunbeam would. And that makes sense from that perspective.

But there’s been all kinds of fascinating work that’s been done more recently about much more subtle effects of RF. For instance, I had a good friend who had brain cancer. And one of the things that his cancer doctors prescribed for him was a helmet with magnetic coils. And they would resonate at around 200 kilohertz, a relatively low frequency by wireless standards. And it has been demonstrated in medical tests that with the right waveform and the right pulse rate and so forth, that can tend to retard cancer. [See Novocure, for instance].

Of course, that’s an effect that is much lower than any thermal heating kind of effect. So I do think there is a lot we do not fully understand about the more subtle effects of wireless and how it can have an impact on our body’s nervous system or other subtle effects. interactions, electrochemical interactions that we have in our body. I guess the good news, though, is we live bathed in a sea of RF, and there doesn’t appear to be very acute toxic reactions to it. But it’s still something that you should be careful of. I I’ll set it down, I’ll use a wired headset to talk on my cell phone, I would only keep my cell phone next to me if I’m carrying it. somewhere and I can’t take it out of my pocket and put it like on the other seat of the car, keep it away from me.

So some of the most extreme RF exposures you’ll get are the ones that are pretty much under your control. Keep your Wi-Fi router away from where you sleep, stay as far away from your phone as is reasonably achievable while still being able to use it, things like that.

Paul: Yeah, I agree. There’s a lot of things that I suppose people have become a little bit relaxed with and there’s easy ways that you can produce it. We talked about Einstein just there and I mentioned Francis Bacon. I want to get into that sort of thing, but while we’re on this topic, while we are talking a little bit technical, well, it’s not technical for you, but do you want to explain, because we quite often hear quantum mechanics and quantum limit, but to But does the everyday person actually understand what this is, or it’s just a passing term that we just brush off because we don’t understand it?

Hans: Well, I guess it depends on the person. But really, all that means is if you go down to a high enough resolution looking at how things work, Things tend to not be a continuum, but rather to break down into particles. That was the initial discovery of atomic theory, that we could explain chemical reactions from the theory that everything is made of atoms, and those atoms come together with certain rules to form molecules, and they combine in certain ratios, which explains why so many grams of this substance and so many grams of that substance will come together to give you some resultant from the reaction. When you’re looking and talking about electromagnetism, it’s really tough to perceive quantum effects on a macroscopic level.

There’s been some research arguing that the human eye is so sensitive that with a probability greater than just chance, you can detect a single photon in your eye in a darkened room. But your eye is not a very efficient photon detector, so it doesn’t detect them with a very high probability rate, but apparently it can be done. But for most everyday kinds of applications, the quantum realm, other than the fact that quantum mechanics enables a lot of the interesting devices that we take advantage of, everything from computer chips with the solid-state devices that make up integrated circuits these days, or things like lasers that rely on aspects of quantum physics in order to work. Once you get down to that tiny, tiny scale, how do they find evidence for any of this?

Well, that’s... makes it very interesting for trying to figure out where to start on it. Some of the first evidence was observed in classical times by a Roman poet, I think it’s Leucippius [I spoke in error, it’s Lucretius], who made a bunch of observations about how wet clothes on a sunny day will dry without you ever actually seeing the water leaving the clothes, or that if you see a beam of light in a dark room, you’ll see little tiny flecks of dust in the room.

One of the most Fruitful such observations is when Lewis and Clark were making their explorations traversing North America, one of the many plants that they collected was a flower called, I think it was Pink Fairy Flower, something like that. and samples of that got in the hands of a Scottish botanist named Brown. He took a look at it under his microscope and he discovered the pollen was wiggling around in a very random fashion. He attributed that to the pollen must be alive in some sense and moving on its own.

But one of the other things Einstein discovered is that behavior, something called Brownian motion, is actually due to the fact that when you get down to a very small scale, and pollen floating in water is a small enough scale to see this, there will be random fluctuations. A few more atoms will hit on one side of the pollen than on the other side of the pollen as everything is jostling around, and that gives rise to that kind of random Motion of the Pollen Under the Microscope. So that, for instance, is evidence of quantum behavior in the sense of the atomic theory.

I mentioned the photoelectric effect, which is something else that Einstein did some pioneering work in, and the idea there was it was discovered that you could shine light on a metal, and even if it was a very intense light, nothing would happen until you got the frequency up high enough, and then even a very weak light of a high enough frequency would be able to make electrons pop out of the surface of the metal and start a current flowing. And that has been interpreted as you have to have enough energy in an individual photon of a high enough frequency in order to interact with the electron and make it jump out of the surface of the metal.

There’s some interesting work that was done on the thermal radiation that a physicist named Max Planck looked at. He really came up with the first idea that light might have a quantum nature. He found mathematically he had to assume that light was quantized, that it came in discrete frequencies instead of being a continuum in order to explain the spectrum that he saw from thermal radiation from what’s called a black body. So there’s been a lot of experimental evidence that led people down this road to starting to think in terms of quantum theory.

Paul: I don’t even know how to ask this question, but you explained that the data, say from a cell phone, is moving through these waves and the tighter the waves, the more data you can fit. How does that data travel through the air? Is it travelling through in these tiny microscopic particles?

Hans: Well, it’s really... The waves are carrying the energy around, but the way you send data on a radio wave, an electromagnetic wave, is you have to modulate it in some way. You have to make some kind of a change in the wave. One of the first kinds of radios was amplitude modulation. In fact, AM radio is still a fixture on your radio dial in most places. And what that did was just take a carrier wave, an RF wave at a particular frequency of several hundred kilohertz or megahertz or more, and change the intensity of it in sync with the audio.

So our voices operate with acoustic frequencies that are on the order of maybe 20 to as high as 10,000 or so hertz. So they put that much slower vibration in the amplitude of a radio wave and they can send the audio that way over the radio wave.

There are a whole bunch of other kinds of modulations, frequency modulation, phase modulation that are used for those kinds of analog signals. In data transfer, what they typically do is they’re trying to send ones and zeros, binary data. So what they’ll do is things like, well, one of the simplest is something called binary phase shift keying or BPSK, where what they’ll do is they’ll just invert the wave. And if you have a wave in the normal orientation, that’s a 1, and if it’s inverted, it’s a 0.

But they can do much more complicated modulations where they’re changing both the amplitude and the phase of that underlying signal to pack more data into a more narrow bandwidth. That’s one of the fascinating things about studying wireless engineering is understanding the many clever modulation schemes people have done in order to make a radio wave carry data and then be able to extract it reliably on the other end without getting interfered with by all the other signals in the environment.

Paul: I can see how the more you think about this stuff, the more exercise that your brain is getting. It’s Yeah, got to be expanding the thinking. It hurts just to get your head around this stuff. I had a conversation on the podcast about Tartaria and we talked a little bit about the energy potential of some of these buildings and ley lines of the earth and things like that. Have you ever looked into any of that type of things?

Hans: I’ve looked into that a little bit. I find the hypothesis fascinating of the hidden civilization, the traces of which were wiped out. As I’ve looked into it, certainly I think there’s a lot we don’t know about our ancient history, but Tartaria, I think, if you’re talking about this recently and in historic times, I really don’t think the evidence supports there having been a vast technologically advanced civilization within the last few centuries leaving buildings around for us to discover instead of build.

I know people who look at World’s Fairs are fascinated at how they were able to put up these magnificent looking if somewhat fragile and temporary buildings in such a quick time frame. But…

There is certainly some interesting bits of RF and wireless technology that appear to have been available in ancient times. For instance, there’s something called, referred to as the Baghdad Battery, where people have found old ceramic jars with copper and zinc electrodes that look as though they were batteries that may have been used to do things like electroplating of gold on base metals. So there’s a lot of ancient technology that was closely protected and secret that we still aren’t really sure how it was done.

The Byzantines, for instance, had Greek fire. They had an incendiary weapon that gave them, you know, basically a super weapon that gave them naval supremacy because they could light the enemy ships on fire and send streams of burning material and engulf enemy ships in flame. We’re still not really sure how that worked, though a lot of chemical engineers have taken some guesses about how they might have pulled that off.

There’s also some fascinating, you know, look at Roman concrete, for instance. The Romans, just whether by luck or skill, we’re not sure, or just the materials they had available, the particular kind of basalt and pumice. that they were working with came up with some concrete that has proven remarkably durable. Like when they made the Pantheon, the vast spherical shell out of concrete, I mean, it stands to this day with less damage and deterioration than a lot of modern concrete structures that have only been around for a few decades.

So there’s certainly a lot we don’t understand about ancient Technology and there are probably additional technologies we aren’t even familiar with out there, but I don’t think the kind of widespread version that’s envisioned by the people who talk about Tartaria has enough support to get too excited about.

Paul: I guess this is something that fascinates me because someone like yourself who’s obviously extremely knowledgeable on the topic of physics and the book collection you have behind you there is vast. You talk about some of these characters through history. You know a lot about the various scientists. How do you decipher, because as Robert Frederick talks about the influence of Sir Francis Bacon and the propaganda of Shakespeare, and we’ll get into Einstein, But it must be very difficult to, do you go through and look at the experiments through time, through history and think, well, that’s possible and this one was possibly promoted beyond its capabilities and so over time they paint a picture. How do you decipher what’s right, what’s real and what’s potentially not as good as the other side or you know what I’m trying to say?

Hans: Oh, I do indeed. And anyone who has lived through the last decade or so with their eyes open has gotten quite the education in how people attempt to twist reality to serve their own purposes. And certainly that has been going on for as long as history. And I particularly appreciate Robert Frederick’s treatment of Francis Bacon. I was familiar with a lot of the basics of Francis Bacon and particularly his influence on science. But Robert Frederick opened my eyes to how that was just one small part of a much larger kind of program for world domination of the British Empire.

So when you go back and take a look at the history of science, you can see how certain scientists have been promoted for better or worse. to serve other people’s agendas. Everyone wanted their own nation’s scientists to be acclaimed, the best and brightest and savviest of all the scientists in the world. And those rivalries led to a lot of skullduggery taking place in the background that only accidentally comes to light even centuries after the events. I’ll give you an example.

The discovery of the planet Neptune. There was a French, I guess you’d call him an astronomer and physicist, who calculated, looking at perturbations in the orbit of Uranus, he calculated there had to be another planet out there beyond the orbit of Uranus. And he made a prediction of where that planet ought to be. And people didn’t really pay much attention to it. The English astronomers, they saw his article in the journal, but ho-hum, people make predictions all the time.

Then Le Verrier got serious and wrote another article with revised calculations. And that started to get people excited. And George Airy, the Astronomer Royal for Britain, assigned astronomers to start looking and see if they could find this mystery planet. Le Verrier went to an astronomer in Berlin who just so happened to have very accurate star charts of the area that Le Verrier had predicted this new planet, which we ended up calling Neptune, would be. So the astronomer in Berlin was able to take a look at his field of view and compare it to his star charts and very quickly identify, wait, that one is not in the star charts, let’s track it for a few days, it’s moved, bingo, we’ve got it.

Meanwhile, the British astronomers, not having those star charts, were having to make observations one week and then come back a few weeks later and compare to see if anything had moved. So it was a much more inefficient process. The upshot was that Le Verrier and the German astronomer, whose name is escaping me right now, they made the discovery and announced it. And Airy came back and said, oh, well, we had it. And look, John Couch Adams had a calculation that was almost the same as Le Verrier. So English science is just as good as French science.

The full correspondence file on this, a historian went looking for it, I think in the 1970s, wanted to write the story of the English reaction to Le Verrier’s discovery and how the English astronomer Adams had come up with his calculation. And for some reason the file was missing. All of the correspondence that Airy had had with Adams and with the astronomers there who were looking for this mystery planet, no one could find it until an astronomer who had been at the Greenwich Observatory died in Argentina. in 1998 or 1999, and his colleagues were going through his stuff and found this folder with all of these 150-year-old documents. They found the correspondence and all of the skullduggery that Airy was engaging in, exaggerating how closely Adams was to the correct solution and so forth, that finally came to light.

But certainly when I was in school, that was not the version of the story that I got. Le Verrier, yeah, he had it first, but Adams was right there in a photo finish with him with just as accurate a calculation. We only learn about stories like that through pretty extraordinary circumstances where someone brings the original correspondence to light despite the fact that people are trying to hide it. I mean, if that English astronomer who’d walked off with the files had just decided, well, let me just junk them, No one would know any of this. Fortunately, he kept and preserved them, and when they were finally found, the true story came to light. But those kinds of things happen all the time, and most of the time we don’t necessarily know what’s going on.

Paul: Several guests over time, and I’ve heard you speak about this too, Francis Bacon’s involvement in the Royal Society. Basically, what you’re talking about there is, again, it seems as if Certain, maybe not the scientists themselves, but their theories are pushed along by something like the Royal Society as a useful theory that could assist them in their, I guess, control of society and time or future societies. And their competition, you know, I think about someone like Louis Pasteur, he’s promoted along. and his competition at the time are forgotten and you have, even now in modern times, when you read about these people, they’re promoted in Wikipedia or whatever as the idea and they speak about it as if it’s not even a theory, it’s a fact. So much of science over time has been like that and I guess the theory is that this came from Francis Bacon.

Hans: Well, Francis Bacon is the one who first decided that science would be a tool of statecraft, that it would be used for the benefit of all mankind, and incidentally, for the benefit of those who were wielding this awesome scientific power. It’s interesting that for all of his advocacy of experimental science, Bacon was dismissive of his contemporaries who were doing real science, people like Gilbert, who was doing a lot of the pioneering work in magnetism, or his doctor who was named William Harvey, who did a lot of the pioneering work in understanding the circulatory system. Bacon preached a good game, but in practice, the results he got were negligible with his advocacy of science.

But what he did do was promote the idea of science Scientism and of scientists having a leading role in the state through his novella, New Atlantis, which, I mean, it’s a quick and easy read. Everyone should read that because the modern scientific establishment is, it was basically designed by Bacon in that little short story from, you know, 1622, 23, whenever it was published. That was the inspiration for the Royal Society.

When the Royal Society did their first history within a decade or so being formed, they had this beautiful, elaborate frontispiece facing the title page where they had The three key figures in the Royal Society. Of course, they had the king, I guess it was King Charles II. They had the current president of the Royal Society. And there on the side was Francis Bacon, the man who inspired the whole enterprise. as they acknowledged. And interestingly, if you’re into Masonic symbolism, it’s rife with checkerboard floors and compasses and squares all over the place and the parallel columns. There’s all kinds of Masonic symbolism in that, and this is long before the official coming out of Freemasonry in 1717. But that had a lot of influence on the course of science and on using science as a tool to advance political goals.

Some of the more significant episodes of that are, of course, evolution was promoted very heavily by insiders in the British establishment. Freudian psychology similarly got a lot of boosting in the 1920s. One of the things that I particularly have investigated is how Einstein got so popular. That’s a fascinating story if you’d like me to go into the popularity of Einstein.

Paul: Yeah, absolutely. Because when I hear you talk about that story, it reminds me of we just had the last few years and this trust the science. And you have people who are promoted like rock stars. Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Cox, who are there on TV and they talk the big talk. But I don’t know if they’re in a lab doing any experiments or anything. They’re just like the media faces. And you talk about Einstein arriving in America, and I don’t think the people were even there to see him, but it was promoted like he was the rock star arriving. Science is now the most important thing ever. But you don’t have to know why, and you’re not allowed to ask any questions. You just have to believe that these people are smarter than you and have the answers.

Hans: Richard Feynman had a good antidote for that. He’s a famous physicist. Feynman said that science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts. And if you’re not approaching science from that perspective where you are willing to accept that the so-called experts could very easily be wrong and you need to be figuring things out yourself, if you’re advocating trust the science, you’re demonstrating you have no clue what science is or how it works. And yes, people who are willing to spout politically convenient things Ideas. They’re the ones who get the promotion. They’re the ones in the public eye.

The story with Einstein is kind of fascinating because He came to the United States on a lecture tour. It was a promotional tour to raise funds for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. And he came in a party with some leading Zionist leaders, including Chaim Weitzman, who ended up being the first president of Israel.

And there was a lot of division within the American Jewish community about that. The more established German-English Jews who held positions of responsibility, owned newspapers, ran businesses and so forth, and were involved in banking. They were very skeptical of the newly arrived Eastern European and Russian Jews who were very enthusiastic about this notion of having a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

So when Weitzman showed up with Einstein and the rest of his party, thousands of people came to greet them on the docks. And when they were there to greet Weitzman and the Zionists, and Einstein was kind of a second thought.

But when the non-Jewish reporters came to cover the story, they hadn’t heard of this Weitzman guy, but Einstein had been in the news because of his work in relativity. So they just assumed that the crowd was there to greet Einstein, the famous scientist. And people like Ox at the New York Times, that fit his agenda because that stole the oxygen from the Zionist campaign and transferred it to Einstein instead.

So the New York Times in particular. was relentless about promoting Einstein all through this course. You’d have never known that it was about trying to raise funds for the Zionist cause and for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. It was all Einstein, Einstein, Einstein, giving lectures, meeting the president, and so on and so forth. So that’s a case where we can understand the publicity campaign that was going on.

And in fact, it’s really instructive to go back to the 1920s and take a look at the kinds of publicity campaigns and propaganda back then. Because those were the early days of people like Edward Bernays who were busy trying to manipulate public opinion. Bernays founded public relations. And instead of wining and dining reporters and twisting editors’ arms to try to get them to cover his clients, His approach was to create events that demanded coverage.

So when he got married, for instance, Bernays had his wife go and register in her maiden name for the honeymoon suite at the Waldorf Astoria. And that was so unconventional that hundreds of newspapers wrote articles about the august hotel, most prestigious hotel in New York, being willing to let the honeymoon suite go to a woman under her maiden name instead of in the name of her father or her husband. And it was a triple whammy for him because he got to promote the Waldorf Astoria, he got to promote himself, and he got to promote the cause of feminism, which he was a big supporter of.

And it turns out he was a friend of Chaim Weitzman, and if Bernays is to be believed, which you have to be a little careful about, Weitzman actually offered him the position of foreign minister or secretary of state for Israel for all of his contributions to the cause. Bernays declined it. But although it’s acknowledged that Bernays did work for Weitzman, I haven’t been able to find anything on the details of specifically what he did. But it’s interesting to note that whole scheme of thousands of people coming to greet the boat at the docks when it arrived. That’s exactly the kind of events and circumstances that Bernays would tend to engineer if he were involved in a publicity campaign. So I suspect that he was involved. The evidence is just circumstantial.

Going back to the 1920s and taking a look at the propaganda campaigns is very instructive because you can see how all of these things worked and how they played out and how people were easily manipulated. Things like when Einstein’s friend Max Born wrote a book on relativity.

Born thought, you know, I’m going to put a picture of Albert Einstein facing the title page of the book. And his and Einstein’s mutual friend, a physicist named Max von Laue, was absolutely shocked at the effrontery of putting a picture of someone in a book. I mean, it was Shameless self-promotion. We couldn’t have that kind of thing. It’s disreputable. It’ll ruin your reputation and Einstein’s reputation. And so Born pulled the picture.

But meanwhile, in a lot of the Jewish press that was very friendly to Einstein in the wake of the discovery, the verification of general relativity through the 1919 eclipse of the sun, they were putting his picture on the cover of magazines and promoting him as the most brilliant thinker since Copernicus and Galileo and Newton, you know, step aside Newton, here comes Einstein.

And you can understand how A culture that had Max von Laue’s attitude of recoiling from that shameless self-promotion. There’d be a lot of people reacting negatively and a lot of people influenced by that over-the-top attitude. Promotion. I mean, we think nothing of that kind of thing today, but in the early years of propaganda, those attacks or those techniques were really powerful and devastating and had enormous effect.

Paul: So Well, thank you for listening to this week’s conversation with Hans Schantz on physics. And I don’t mind exercising my brain a little bit. Some of these things take a bit of time to get your head around. I’ll be back in about a week with part two where we talk more about... Einstein and some of his work and perhaps the ways he may have been promoted.

You can find Hans’s work if you search Hans G. Schantz at Substack or you can search aetherczar and you’ll find his work there. So that’s A-E-T-H-E-R-C-Z-A-R. And until next time, stay well.

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Thanks again to Ash Grunald. This song is Think Tank from the album Give Science. Well, if I’m feeling the way tomorrow And it’s so cool Leaving us in their tracks And it’s so evil It’s taking ground and I won’t get it back Run Over by the tank tank About a Pain Tank.

That’s all for now. Remember always to keep calm, and make physics great again.

See you next week,

Hans

P.S. Pick up your copy of Fields & Energy Book I: Fundamentals and Origins of Electromagnetism, if you haven’t already:

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Overall, the paper is a provocative bridge between classical electromagnetism and quantum atomic physics. It suggests that at least the radiative behavior of the simplest atom carries an imprint of classical antenna physics, with the “hidden variables” of energy storage, power flow, and geometry doing the explanatory work that pure QM observables leave implicit. Whether this generalizes to other atoms, molecules, or the full quantum formalism remains an open question raised by the work.

The full paper is here:

Transcript

Well, thank you all for coming to my presentation. My name is Hans Schantz.

I am with nou Systems and the Society for Post-Quantum Research, and my topic today is answering the question, “is hydrogen an electrically small antenna?”

I’ll start by talking about the spectrum of hydrogen, how we figured it out, electrically small antenna theory. I’ll present my method and approach, my results and interpretation, and finally, some conclusions.

Now, the hydrogen spectrum was first characterized by Balmer in 1885, and not long thereafter, Rydberg generalized the results, developing a formula showing how the spectral lines followed simple integer ratios.

Not long thereafter, additional series were identified by Lyman, the original Balmer series, and then Paschen. So by 1910, it was obvious there was some kind of structure, some mechanism involved in hydrogen, but no one had a good idea what was going on.

In 1913, Niels Bohr came up with his model that allowed the calculation of the Rydberg constant and tied hydrogen back to the original Planck quantum theory.

Now in 1925, quantum mechanics advanced to the point where Heisenberg was actually calculating transition probabilities. He rejected any reliance on unobserved electron orbitals, arguing that the basis of his work was to establish theoretical quantum mechanics on relations between quantities which are observable. Max Born came up with his probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics. And by 1928, Bohr was describing and putting forth the Copenhagen interpretation, arguing that atomic phenomena require renunciation of any sort of classical visibility.

So in the strictest Copenhagen framework, the hydrogen atom is just defined by its transition probabilities, and deeper mechanisms are considered inaccessible.

So, let’s go back to electrically small antenna theory.

Back in the 1930s, Frederick Emmons Terman could say an understanding of the mechanism by which energy is radiated from a circuit and the derivation of the equations for expressing it are unfamiliar to the ordinary engineer. That changed in the 1930s thanks to the work of Schelkunoff and others who brought Maxwell into RF, who introduced antennas as boundary value problems, and perhaps most importantly, extended the concept of impedance to fields. In 1948, Harald T. Friis identified his simple link law describing propagation.

Of course, as Friis noted in his memoirs, the problems were actually not quite so simple before they had been solved.

Now, that sets the context within which Lan Chen Chu developed the first limits for the radiation quality factor of a dipole enclosed within a sphere of a particular radius.

Now, in the extremely small limit, which we’re going to be working in, that reduces to just looking at 1 over ka cubed, where a is the boundary sphere of the antenna. You can also look at the quality factor as the ratio of 2 pi times the energy that’s stored per the energy radiated per cycle. And, of course, the quality factor is also the ratio of the center frequency over the bandwidth for a particular radiator.

Now, that was just the beginning of an extensive literature.

Roger Fuller Harrington, who incidentally just celebrated his 100th birthday a few months ago, extended Chu’s analysis to include a variety of other parameters, and there’s a whole host of literature that I’ve summarized about extending these concepts of impedance, bandwidth, and Q. The recent review article by Yaghjian talks about all of those in great detail, and I highly recommend it. It’s available on arxiv.org.

So in summary, there is still some controversy about Q limits.

The Q limit typically talks about the energy stored outside that boundary sphere, and we don’t necessarily know exactly the details of the energy stored inside. There’s also some controversy about trying to come up with a clean identification of radiated versus stored energy. But those are minor problems of order one. The power exponent dominates for very, very small antennas. So for a dipole, that’s the Q limit inverse ka cubed. And we can look at quadruple, octopole, or arbitrary orbital angular momentum states and have their respective Q limits.

Meanwhile, while engineers were working on these antenna limits, physicists went off into quantum electrodynamics looking at, in brief, features that really aren’t all that relevant to the everyday practice of antennas.

Critics have complained that QED has a variety of issues, for instance, not being able to predict the muon anomaly. What’s happened is that just as Maxwell’s equations were once unfamiliar to the ordinary practicing engineer, today, electrically small antenna theory is unfamiliar to the typical practicing physicist.

If you go back to World War II, this book here on the left, Stratton, was the standard text that Radiation Lab, radar engineers at MIT, and physicists at Los Alamos working on the Manhattan Project, this was the book they used. And it has a host of very good practical applied electromagnetic topics.

Fast forward 50 years to when I was in grad school, studying out of this book, Jackson’s Classical Electrodynamics, and you can compare the applied topics and discover that Jackson presents an atrophied and dumbed-down version of the applied electromagnetic topics that were in Stratton. And in fact, doesn’t at all address any of the advances since World War II on things like electrically small antenna theory and matching and impedance. Impedance is just barely covered in passing.

So the situation today is that today’s physicists in their training, unless they make special efforts to study microwave theory, know less about practical applied electromagnetism than their predecessors of 80 years ago.

And that’s the bridge, that theory practice divide bridge, that I’d like to try to begin resolving in my talk today.

So what I’m going to do is treat atomic transitions as multipoles confined within an antenna boundary sphere of radius a, where that a is the mean radius of the electron orbital. I’ll focus on dipole transitions because it turns out they’re the ones that dominate the decay states of hydrogen, and you can pretty much ignore the higher order transitions.

And what we have to do, the frequency, we can pull straight off of the spectral lines. We know the wavelength. We can calculate the frequency. The challenge is looking at the line width. Atomic physicists use something called the Einstein A coefficient, which is the transition probability per unit time for a spontaneous emission from an upper state to a lower state. And then we can define the Q by basically taking 2 pi times the frequency of the transition and dividing by that Einstein coefficient.

Now, there’s one complication about that. It gives a partial lifetime for a particular transition. I’ll explain why that’s a complication here in just a moment. So the next question we have to ask is, how big is this hydrogen antenna?

And that gets complicated because the hydrogen atom is a very peculiar kind of antenna. If it’s in an excited state about to transmit, it’s bigger than if it’s in a ground state about to receive. And we’ll see what the implications of that are. But that mean orbital radius ought to set upper and lower bounds on how big our hydrogen atom is for a particular frequency.

So, I took two approaches to the problem. I calculated the transmit and receive Q limits based on the initial excited and final states. And then I took the observed quality factor, assumed it was operating at the Q limit, and calculated what the effective radiation size was. So I went both ways through the problem there.

So, these are the results I got for calculating the quality factor for hydrogen. And you’ll notice three cases line up pretty closely, the Lyman 2 - 1, Balmer 3 - 2, and Paschen 4 - 3. That’s because those are cases where that transition dominates the transitions out of that state. 4 to 3, for instance, is much more likely than 4 to 2 or 4 to 1, and that’s why you can’t calculate a reliable Q factor or, as it’ll turn out, a radiation size from those coefficients.

But for the transitions where we’re looking at a dominant mode, the 4 to 3, the 3 to 2, and the 2 to 1, it comes pretty close, like within a factor of 2 or so, of matching the classically predicted radiation Q limit.

And I can go into the details of why that is, but it’s detailed in the paper why those are the dominant states, why the hydrogen atom much prefers going from 4 to 3 instead of 4 to 2 or a lower-order state.

Chu limit only accounts for the energy that is stored outside that antenna boundary sphere. And not long ago, Hansen and Collins raised the argument that if you account for the interior energy, you have to add a coefficient to that 1 over kr cubed or ka cubed. And that coefficient, they argued, was 3 halves ka cubed.

If we apply that Hansen and Collins limit, what we discover is the Lyman, Balmer, and Paschen transitions are 52%, 22%, and 2% above that revised Q limit. So we have really good agreement between the actual size of the hydrogen atom and what you would expect from applying the Q limit.

So the bottom line here is this classical energy-based description accurately reproduces the quantum bandwidth for these dominant transition cases.

So going the other way, taking the observed Q and trying to predict the radiation size, what we do is we solve that Hanson-Collins-Chu limit for the size, the radiation size of the hydrogen atom. And again, we find excellent agreement for those dominant transitions, 2 to 1, 3 to 2, 4 to 3.

In fact, they’re all a little smaller, which can be accounted for by the fact that there are other transitions taking place in those systems that we aren’t accounting for in our Einstein coefficients. And when we don’t have a dominant decay, then the Einstein coefficient we’re using is actually a little less than the total Einstein coefficient for that process.

So when we calculate the observed Q, it ends up being a little bigger than sometimes a lot bigger than the true quality factor for that case. And similarly, substituting that into the radiation size formula, an overestimated Q, which is what you saw in a lot of the results from the previous table, corresponds to an underestimated radiation size, which in general is what we’re seeing. The radiation sizes are a little smaller than you would expect.

So classical electromagnetics destabilized the atom. The Larmor formula told us if we had that electron rotating around a center charge, it’s going to radiate away and the atom will collapse in 10 to the minus 11 seconds. Given a harmonically bound charge of a particular angular frequency, it turns out that that classical Larmor formula gives us the classical radiative lifetime.

And as I dug into it, it is used in some of the semi-classical forms for the decay states of hydrogen in early radiation damping analysis. So that decay time can be calculated classically, and therefore it’s not all that surprising that you could use the Chu limit and work the size of the radiator into that same kind of classical analysis.

So in conclusion, there are really two opposing worldviews here.

In the strictest Copenhagen interpretation, Copenhagen hydrogen atom is defined by its observables. Its emissions are abstract mathematical transitions between Hilbert vector states, and any underlying mechanism is inaccessible or meaningless.

In the realist perspective, the hydrogen atom is a real electromagnetic system. Its emissions are physical radiation processes, and the underlying mechanism is, as we’ve seen in this paper, in principle accessible and meaningful.

So the conclusion is that the hydrogen’s radiation quality factor does, in fact, scale as the Chu limit would predict for dipole transitions. It’s consistent with what we would expect for an electrically small antenna, and we obtain an inferred radiation radius comparable to the mean orbital radius of the electrons in the quantum mechanical hydrogen. Now, this is not suggesting that we have classical electromagnetic orbits, but once those are in place, these fundamental processes in transmission and radiation in atomic physics align closely with what we’re doing in antenna theory.

So the observables that quantum mechanics focuses on reveal the presence of these underlying hidden variables of stored energy, radiated power, and the orbital geometry.

You may have heard about the ghost murmur quantum device and the argument that there’s some kind of hypersensitive quantum device that can pick up a heartbeat from 40 miles away.

Quantum detection does not magically transcend the traditionally expected performance versus size that you would get in a classical system.

Next steps, there’s a lot of work that we could do to try to identify the other non-dominant transitions and how they behave. Look at hydrogenic ions like, for instance, helium and test the Z scaling of this. It would be interesting to test the dipole radiation pattern by sticking atoms in a cold ion trap and seeing if their emissions follow the sine squared dipole-like radiation pattern. And we can look at environmental modifications. You can change the emission rates putting atoms inside cavities like a Purcell effect.

So in summary, I’ve talked about the hydrogen spectrum, electrically small antenna theory, my methods, results, and interpretations, conclusions, and future work. If you’re interested in this, the paper and my work in this area on fields and energy is published on my Substack at aetherczar.substack.com.

I will be presenting an update as the closing keynote at this year’s IEEE EMC Symposium. I’ll be talking about “How Electromagnetism and Quantum Mechanics Work and Where Physics Went Wrong.”

And I hope to see you online. Thank you very much for your attention.

Any questions?

Yes. I have a question. So when you’re thinking about the behavior of the energy, it may not be a sinusoidal time behavior, you know, like Harmuth’s idea that you could have a set of basis functions that were not sinusoidal. How would that impact your looking at that research? Could you come up with a non-sinusoidal set of basis functions that would better describe what’s happening in the hydrogen atom?

Probably not, because it is a very high Q, very narrow band system that is very accurately modeled using sine waves. So if you look at those spectral lines, a typical hydrogen spectral line that’s operating at near visible light or infrared or ultraviolet that region has a bandwidth of maybe 100 megahertz or less, so it’s what 10 to the 15 Hertz is the typical kind of frequency. So I think the harmonic sine-wave based approach - that is probably the valid way to go.

So do you have any theory on those potential underlying mechanisms?

Well, it’s very clear that hydrogen follows electrically small antenna theory. So one of the next things to look at is the orbitals are well-defined. So we know, at least probabilistically, where the electron is in an n equals 2, n equals 3, or n equals 4 state. And we know where it’s going to be in a lower order state. And the key would be trying to figure out how does it transition from that higher order state to the lower order state. Right now, we know the beginning. It’s very well characterized. We know the end. It’s very well characterized. And the challenge is to work out the details of the process whereby one orbital turns into another in the time domain, basically.

Yes?

You said something about mapping an antenna pattern.

Yes.

Wouldn’t you have to know an orientation of the atoms you would be in?

If you put it in a cold ion trap it would be possible potentially to align it by applying a magnetic field to orient the hydrogen atoms in a particular orientation and see what you get. And I think that would be very interesting because that would also reveal that there is actual physical geometry involved if you could recover an actual dipole pattern from it.

So in the interest of time, let’s thank our speaker, but he will be available after the session so you can ask more questions. Very interesting topic.

Thank you.

That’s all for now. Remember always to keep calm, and make physics great again.

See you next week,

Hans

P.S. Pick up your copy of Fields & Energy Book I: Fundamentals and Origins of Electromagnetism, if you haven’t already:

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Liverpool is perhaps most famous as the home town for the Beatles. The banquet program kicked off with an excellent performance by “The Cheatles,” Liverpool’s premiere Beatles tribute band. They were a tough act to follow, but then, how many science and history lectures have such an outstanding opening act?

Liverpool is also famous for being the home town of wireless pioneer Oliver Lodge.

I’ve previously written about Lodge within the broader context of UWB antenna history. See for instance, “Three centuries of UWB antenna development,” 2012 IEEE International Conference on Ultra-Wideband (ICUWB), September 2012, DOI: 10.1109/ICUWB.2012.6340483, and the lengthier discussion in The Art and Science of Ultrawideband Antennas, 2nd ed.

In my after-dinner speech, I provide a brief biographical overview of Lodge before focusing on three key ideas Lodge published - ideas that not only influenced the course of wireless history, but also might help us reconcile quantum mechanics with electromagnetism.

If you just want a brief overview, you might want to bail out at this point and check out the abstract I posted last week.

Here we go!

Opening Remarks

Good.

Well, when I received the very kind invitation from Professor Huang and the conference organizers to come and speak with you about Oliver Lodge, of course the first thought that crossed my mind was, “surely there are other people in Liverpool who know far more about Oliver Lodge than I do.” But I realized if you want to convey the message that your hometown hero had a lasting global international legacy, what better way to do that than to bring an outside expert in to testify to that fact? So here I am to talk with you about Oliver Lodge, his legacy as Liverpool’s wireless pioneer.

He was born in 1851, educated at the University of London, but the most significant part of his career was spent right here in Liverpool. The building that we’re in for our conference, the Victoria Museum and Gallery, was built under his administration. He was a professor of physics. It was built in 1892.

This is where he repeated and extended upon Hertz’s experiments. He did a variety of very important work in wireless including the first “syntonic” receiver, I’ll talk about that in a moment, his work on biconical antennas which pioneered the art of ultra-wideband antennas.

He left Liverpool in 1900 to go to Birmingham to be the first principal of the new University of Birmingham. He was knighted in 1902 so it is Sir Oliver Lodge and later in his career he became a science popularizer and did a lot of work promoting the idea of psychical research and spiritualism. He ended up living until 1940.

Now he’s not as well known today but in his day if you take a Google n-gram of his popularity you’ll notice that in his heyday from about 1900 actually through the end of World War II, he was mentioned in more books in the English literature than even Einstein was, at least until Einstein’s death, when Einstein’s popularity skyrocketed, which is a story for another day why that happened. But you can see he still has a lasting popularity and even to this day beats out Neil deGrasse Tyson.

The 1890s were an exciting time to be an electrical engineer and to be in wireless. In 1892, Tesla was pioneering his work on alternating circuit electricity and was just about to come here to the UK for a memorable set of lectures in London and then on to Paris where that picture was made.

Weeks before Tesla arrived, William Crooks, the inventor of the vacuum tube and the cathode ray tube, wrote an article in a magazine where he first introduced the idea of using frequency channelization in radio. Two friends could set their radios to a particular wavelength and communicate using Morse code. It’s a simple idea. It’s a very powerful idea with a lot of implications, the implications of which we’re still working with today. Most everything we do today is involving this kind of frequency channelization. And that’s the whole basis of what gave rise to the whole complicated spectrum chart that we have to deal with today.

But to put that simple idea into practice, someone had to be the first to build a radio to do that. and that was Oliver Lodge. He made the first radio that combined resonant tuning at the transmitter and resonant tuning at the same frequency in the receiver. That was a very important patent and a very important milestone in wireless.

Simple ideas have great implications but it takes a lot of time and effort to bring them to fruition, and we’re seeing that basic idea; still, we’re working to explore all the implications of it even today.

Three Key Insights

Now I was asked to be your “dinner” speaker and not your “until breakfast tomorrow morning” speaker. So I have to necessarily focus on three specific more narrow issues in talking about all the things that Oliver Lodge did.

So I’ll begin by talking about his work in ultrawideband antennas. The second thing I’ll talk about is his observation of the 90-degree phase advance of a transmit signal, which has some really remarkable implications for fundamental antenna theory. And finally, I’ll talk about his concept, really pioneered by Heaviside, but Lodge was a big booster of this idea, of the fact that you have to have a balance of electric and magnetic energy in an electromagnetic wave.

Ultrawideband Antennas

Let’s start with biconical antennas. Lodge invented the biconical antenna in the 1890s. And not only did he invent the biconical, in the same patent he invented the bowtie antenna. This really anticipated the fundamental principle of ultra-wideband antennas, that “fatter is better,” that wasn’t really identified until the 1940s. You need a fat antenna that excludes the near-field energy in order to get wide bandwidth operating out of it. And the principle that a planar antenna is almost as good as the full volumetric antenna. Those two key principles were encapsulated in what Lodge did.

Now, Marconi at the time, he was using these square plate antennas, but he very quickly realized the efficacy of Lodge’s approach, and so a lot of Marconi’s early antennas were things like a massive conical monocone or a fan monopole.

Now, as radio technology improved, people began to be able to make real sine waves instead of having to rely on spark data. So they didn’t need these massive ultra-wideband antennas to have an efficient communications link. So all of this technology was forgotten.

In fact, by the 1930s, the great antenna engineer Harold Wheeler reinvented the biconical antenna, not having any idea that Lodge had already done it. He sent it to his patent attorney, and his patent attorney, doing his due diligence, found the lodge prior art and said, nope, nope, you didn’t invent this, Lodge did.

His contemporary, the RCA antenna engineer Philip Carter, he wasn’t aware of that prior art, and neither was his attorney, and neither was the patent examiner. So he got the second patent that the USPTO issued for the same invention, the biconical antenna. But he also improved on it. He introduced, for instance, the first tapered impedance transition from a transmission line to an antenna. And other people, like Kandoian, improved on the concept coming up with a discone antenna. By the 1930s, there were all kinds of great improvements being made to biconical antennas.

On the top of the Empire State Building in New York City, Nils Lindenblad had his memorable torpedo antenna that was a great ultra-wideband antenna. It had six television channels that it could transmit at the same time with a very low, like a 1.1 to 1 VSWR. And Schelkunoff and Friis were extending the concept of the biconical antenna, taking surfaces that align with the equipotentials of a thin-wire dipole and coming up with what Ted Simpson called “the simplest antenna of all.”

Now, all kinds of very practical planar elements were developed in the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, and the 80s.

And we could stop right here with the story being that Lodge pioneered ultra-wideband antennas, they were forgotten, and then rediscovered. And surely, all those people in the 1930s who were ignorant of Lodge’s work, surely nothing like that could ever happen again in antenna science.

Déjà Vu, All Over Again

Except, it did.

Because in the 1970s there was a lot of interest in ground-penetrating radar for ultra-wideband applications. You stick an antenna on ground that could have a wide range of dielectric constants and conductivities, it’s gonna start ringing. And the practical engineering thing to do is add some loss to dampen out that ringing. And that developed an engineering lore to the effect that you could not have a dipole antenna that was ultrawideband unless it was resistively loaded.

You can see in a government report - that was actually Ofcom that issued that report - about the antenna being the fundamental limit. That popped up in conference papers. As late as 2009, a book on UWB radar insisted that you could not have a single element antenna unless you had some kind of resistive loading or termination.

And when I was at the Electroscience Lab at the Ohio State University, one of my more senior professional colleagues made an ultrawideband dipole that consisted of a bow tie terminated in selected sheets of resistive termination. You’re ending up with an antenna that was twice as big as it had to be and about half as efficient.

But there were at least a couple dozen people, at least a number of whom I know are here in the room, who rediscovered and pioneered the modern era of ultra-wideband antennas, inventing a whole variety of ultra-wideband monopoles.

My contribution was the bottom-fed dipole and coming up with frequency notching on antennas. But many dozens of engineers came up rediscovering those old designs that had been forgotten and bringing them to fruition for the modern era. And you can go to my ultra-wideband antenna book if you’re interested in learning more about that.

So the moral is, read the old masters like Lodge, like Hertz, like Maxwell for these forgotten insights. And never, never forget to check your references.

Models & Physics

Now, there’s a lot of rivalry between scientists in France and Germany and scientists here in the UK. The French historian of science, Pierre Duhem, got very exercised about those English scientists who insisted on having models. who wanted to have some kind of physical model of how electromagnetism worked instead of just taking the field lines as a mathematical abstraction.

In fact, he complained about a new book that explains modern theories of electricity with strings and pulleys and pearl beads and tubes and pumps and toothed wheels. He commented, we thought we were entering the tranquil and neatly ordered abode of reason, but we find ourselves in a factory.

And that was a legitimate complaint because a lot of English writers and a lot of English scientists from Faraday and Maxwell on liked these mechanical models. Heavside commented Kelvin was intensely mechanical and could not accept an aether unless he made a model of it.

The 90° Phase Advance & Antenna Physics

But the book that Duhem was complaining about was this book. By Oliver Lodge, Modern Theories or Modern Views of Electricity, full of the cogwheels in the aether to show how tensions and torsions and forces are moved by magnetic and electric fields.

But elsewhere in that book, there is a fascinating and subtle clue to some very fundamental principles about how antennas work. He commented that the effective source of radiation is not at the oscillator itself, but a quarter wave or 90 degrees in advance. And that that was something Hertz found. This is the figure from Hertz’s electric wave showing how the phase progression works from a small dipole. So Hertz noted that was a consequence of Maxwell’s equations.

Without knowing this unfortunately I had re-derived it for making low frequency near-field electromagnetic ranging systems to do indoor location but the really interesting implication of that is that there is a difference between the transmit and receive transfer functions for an antenna the transmit receive function is the time derivative of the receive function

If we express that in the frequency domain, that’s a factor of j omega, which is that 90 degree difference that Lodge was talking about. And if we square those to get the power, what we discover is that the scalar power transmit transfer function is proportional to omega squared times the scalar power received transfer function.

And what does that look like? that’s basically the difference between aperture and gain. Now that was first noted by Van Etten and Henning Haremuth and Motohisa Kanda in the 1980s.

But that’s why when you look at an ultra-wideband link, if you want to transmit an accurate copy of a voltage signal, you need to use a constant gain antenna over the bandwidth. If you want to receive an accurate copy of a signal, you have to use a constant aperture antenna. And that’s a fundamental difference between transmission and reception that becomes very important in ultrawideband links.

So again, an offhand comment or insight like Lodge’s insight about this 90 degree phase difference on transmit can have some significant implications.

But all of this is Monday morning quarterbacking. This is stuff that was discovered. Wheeler came up with the antennas, the biconical, and only later discovered Lodge had it. And I don’t think Van Etten or Hemming or Motohisa Kanda were at all aware of Lodge or what Stokes had done. So the real trick is, can you do this in advance? Can you find something that’s in Lodge’s work that has been overlooked and has significance today? And I think that answer is yes.

Electric-Magnetic Energy Balance

When telegraphy was first developed there were all kinds of problems. The very first transatlantic telegraph cable failed. It failed because it was highly capacitive and dispersive. It would take several minutes to transmit each individual word. And the chief engineer on the project was a medical doctor instead of an electrical engineer. His prescription to solve it was “more voltage.” And he ended up shorting out the cable.

The first successful cable was laid in 1866, but there are all kinds of anomalies, things like signals going faster one way than the other way, and still dispersion was a persistent problem.

And that’s where Oliver Heaviside came in, developing the telegrapher’s equation. to explain how you have to have a balance of electric and magnetic energy in order to have distortionless propagation. That’s the fundamental principle. Because these cables were capacitive, all you had to do was add an inductive loading coil in order to get them to behave.

Well, I had been working on interference of waves in free space and had the opportunity to talk with Bruce Hunt, who is a brilliant historian of science. If you want to get inside the mindset of Heaviside and Hertz and Lodge and all the people who took Maxwell’s equations and turned it into modern electromagnetics, his book, The Maxwellians, is an excellent book to read.

And he pointed out to me something that was in Lodge that I wasn’t aware of, where Lodge pointed out that’s not just for telegraph cables. All electromagnetic waves in free space have to have a balance of electromagnetic energy. In fact, that’s an equivalent way of expressing the free space impedance, the ratio of E to H being 376 ohms. And you can see in the obituary that he [Lodge] wrote for Oliver Heaviside how he emphasized that as a key discovery that Heaviside had made.

Reconnecting Quantum and EM Physics

So I argue that that principle has the potential to correct a long-standing mistake in quantum mechanics and help reconnect it to electromagnetism.

This is Paul Dirac, one of the founding fathers of electromagnetism. And you can see him standing on the train platform in Stockholm next to Heisenberg and Schrodinger and I guess two of their mothers and one of their wives about to receive the Nobel Prize. Feynman commented that physicists all quote Schiff, a graduate textbook, or all read Schiff but they quote Dirac because he was the respected arbiter of how quantum mechanics works.

And I won’t read the passage in detail from his Principles of Quantum Mechanics, but Dirac argued that two photons can never interfere with each other.

His argument was, if I have two photons interfere with each other, I’m going to get double the field, and if I have double the field, well, the energy goes as the field squared. So I’ll have four times the energy. That violates conservation of energy. And similarly, he argued, if you have a destructive interference, well, the field goes to zero, the energy goes to zero, again, energy conservation is violated. Therefore, no two photons can ever interfere with each other.

What Does EM Have to Say

Well, let’s take a closer look at what classical electromagnetism has to say about that.

Suppose we have two little waves, E cross H, giving us a pointing vector, a forward wave and a reverse wave, and the electric fields are aligned in the same direction, so we’re going to have a constructive interference when they superimpose.

Well then, yes, we get twice the electric field, we get four times the electric energy, but where did that energy come from? If you take a look, the magnetic fields had to be in the opposite directions for that constructive interference. So that magnetic energy turned into electrostatic energy. The total energy is conserved, not just the electric energy.

And it’s the same story in destructive interference. If you have two waves interfering destructively, yes, the electric field cancels out. Yes, there’s no electric energy, but that’s because all the electric energy has become magnetic.

If you take a look at how sine waves interact, if you have two equal and opposite sine waves, they’re moving at the speed of light, but they work together jointly to take the energy. There’s no average energy flow if they’re equal and opposite sine waves. But the energy bounces back and forth a quarter wavelength from an electrostatic node to a magnetostatic node and vice versa every quarter period.

As you’re interested in understanding more about how fields guide the flow of energy, I have an article that was in the Philosophical Transactions a few years ago on reactive fields and energy velocity you can take a look at.

They’re The Same Picture

So when you take a look at the electromagnetic picture of how fields guide energy, say from two slits here, this is a NEC simulation of two slits and the energy flow from the interference pattern. And on this side, you see a often dismissed interpretation of quantum mechanics called the pilot wave theory. And you’ll notice it’s a very similar kind of picture.

In fact, in the words of the internet meme, I think that they’re the same picture.

Conclusion

Well, the takeaway from Oliver Lodge’s legacy is it’s a value to read the old masters and understand their forgotten ideas. That the simple ideas sometimes have very big payoffs but take a lot of time to bring to fruition. And finally, it’s important to understand and apply the basics. Just because something works, that doesn’t mean you necessarily understand why it works or what’s going on.

And if you’re interested in learning more, I can refer you to my Substack, aetherczar.substack.com. I’m writing a series of books on Fields & Energy. Book I, Fundamentals and Origins of Electromagnetism is already out. You can get it on Amazon. I’m serializing it. Most of Book II is already up and posted on the Substack.

I’m working to try to connect electromagnetism with quantum mechanics. In fact, it turns out the hydrogen atom follows all of the quality factor Chu limit rules that you would expect for an electrically small antenna.

I’m going to be presenting that paper in a few weeks. And I’m presenting the closing keynote at the IEEE EMC conference on the topic “How Electromagnetism and Quantum Mechanics Work and Where Physics Went Wrong.”

If you’re interested in an update you can attend that.

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to share with you a little bit of Oliver Lodge’s legacy, and I think that some of the ideas that Oliver Lodge came up with had lasting importance to us and can help us address some pressing issues that we face even today.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you so much for inviting me.

Ah, great timing, thank you. Oh, thanks. Thank you.

Final Written Remarks

My meal arrived just as I was walking back to my seat and sitting down. Truly great service, and thanks to our hosts at the historic Royal Liver Building on the Liverpool waterfront for putting on such a successful banquet.

That’s all for now. Remember always to keep calm, and make physics great again.

See you next week,

Hans

P.S. Pick up your copy of Fields & Energy Book I: Fundamentals and Origins of Electromagnetism, if you haven’t already:

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Transcript: What Physicists Don't Know About Electromagnetism

Okay. I have last year’s talk on YouTube, but unfortunately my sound didn't work, and I had to rely on the camera sound. It's a little bit iffy. But if you want to learn about how electromagnetism, or what can electromagnetism tell us about quantum mechanics, that was last year's talk, and there's a little bit of overlap in the talk here.

Well, it's 3 o'clock, so let me get started. My talk is on the subject, “What Physicists Don't Know About Electromagnetism.”

Now, I am a physicist by training, but I've spent most of my career doing things in applied electromagnetics, designing ultra-wideband antennas, designing near-field systems and near-field links and electrically small antennas and so forth. But I've always wondered how electromagnetism works. And I think there are a lot of very fascinating aspects of classical electromagnetism that have been overlooked by physics that offer some answers to some of the outstanding problems in physics today.

A Tale of Two Books

So let's get started. To begin with, I want to start with a tale of two books. The book you see there on the left, that's Electromagnetic Theory by Stratton, published in 1941. That is the book that physicists and engineers alike used on the Manhattan Project. They used developing radar. This was the book everyone used to study electromagnetic theory, physicists and engineering alike in 1941.

And you can see a whole host of really practical, you know, applied electromagnetic topics are covered in that book. On the right is Jackson's classical electrodynamics. Now, that's the second edition that I used when I was in grad school. But even the third edition, you know, doesn't change the topic selection all that much.

And you'll notice of the topics covered in Stratton, a lot of the really important topics are no longer covered in Jackson. Things like over-the-earth propagation, surface waves, Norton Sommerfeld ground conditions, most of the most practical kinds of wave guides, the principle of electromagnetic similitude and scaling, that's how you change electromagnetic properties to make a model that's bigger or smaller to operate at different frequencies. And about half of the practical, in fact, the more practical aspects of radiation theory, Jackson just covers some of the basics, dipoles and center-fed linear antennas, nothing on arrays, nothing on phase coherent superposition from different elements and so forth.

So arguably, Today's physicists who are educated using the curriculum out of Jackson are less informed about practical electromagnetics than their counterparts of 80 years ago. How could this happen?

Thesis & Introduction

Well, what have physicists been doing in electromagnetics since World War II? Well, the short answer is quantum electrodynamics, the quantum theory of how light, electromagnetics, interacts with matter. Amazing accuracy, the crown jewel of physics, 12-digit agreement between theory and experiment.

Well, so because physicists have left practical electromagnetism to the engineers, All the theory's been figured out. That's an exercise for the drudges who work soldering things together to apply. There's nothing fundamental left to say about nature.

But electromagnetism, though, it turns out has advanced a little bit since the days of Stratton in ways that physicists do not appreciate. So the topic of this talk is going to be what physicists don't know about electromagnetics.

The Strange Story of QED

I'll begin by presenting the strange story of quantum electrodynamics. And as a physicist, as someone who studied the subject in grad school, getting my PhD, I had no idea how bad it was. And I really owe this guy, Oliver Consa, who wrote this article, “Something is Wrong in the State of QED,” which I'm basically summarizing here for the next 20 minutes or so. And if you want to go into more details than the kind of superficial, top-level version I'm presenting, I suggest you take a look at what he had to say.

The Monster From Shelter Island

So we begin by going to the first major conference in physics after World War II ended, the Shelter Island Conference on the foundations of quantum mechanics. All the younger generation of physicists were there. One of the key attendees, Julian Schwinger, said it was the first time that people who had all this physics pent up in them for five years could talk to each other without somebody peering over their shoulders and saying, is this cleared?

And one of the key things that everyone is interested in talking about is something called the Lamb shift. Willis Eugene Lamb discovered there was about a 1 gigahertz, 1,000 megacycle or megahertz discrepancy between the hydrogen energy levels.

Another physicist, Rabi, noted this was a 0.1% anomaly in the hyperfine structure of hydrogen, and Gregory Bright interpreted that as being due to the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron. The electron has a certain amount of angular momentum, and that rotating charge gives rise to a little bit of a magnetic moment.

But the key point here is this meant Dirac's relativistic quantum mechanics was wrong, or at least needed a little bit of correction. And the Dirac quantum mechanics, that was the then crown jewel of the physical understanding of the universe.

So it was interpreted as a perturbation due to the quantum vacuum that hadn't been accounted for in Dirac's theory. And so everyone there at Shelter Island talked about it.

On the train ride home, Hans Bethe, came up with an idea. I won't go into the details of the equation, but what he came up with was a mathematical expression for that frequency difference. It depends on this factor K here. Well, that K is an infinite series. It goes to infinity.

But he said, well, let's just assume that it stops at the rest mass of the electron. So let's solve the problem of the math going to infinity. Then he said, well, and in order to get the numbers to work out more or less correctly, this constant in the equation had to be set to a value of 242 electron volts, which, as you know, is a very big number. But by jiggering the numbers around, they were able to get, you know, Beta was able to get a calculation that was more or less giving that 1 gigahertz answer.

Well, the problem was solved by Schwinger. And he said, no, all you have to do is take a very important physical constant, the fine structure constant. And that's about six times larger than the discrepancy that we're seeing here. And 2 pi, that's about six. So if we divide that by 2 pi, we end up getting a correction that lines up pretty closely with the experimental value.

The Pocono Conference

And he wrote this in a short paper and didn't really explain the theoretical reasoning for why that popped up there. So about a year later, there was another conference, a Pocono conference, and everyone was looking forward to hearing, how did Schwinger come up with this answer?

And Schwinger spent about five or six hours just doing math on the chalkboard. He drove out the entire audience with the exception of Beta and Fermi, who were the only two left behind at the end of the five or six hours, And as Oppenheimer quipped, others gave talks to show others how to do the calculation. Schwinger gave talks to show that only he could do it.

Well, the next day wasn't all that much better. This young guy named Richard Feynman came up, and he presented a bunch of crazy diagrams up on the board and was trying to align them with perturbations in the quantum vacuum. And… the red didn't show up very well in there?

He was describing what happened. He said he didn't have a mathematical scheme to talk about. The only way he knew one of his formulas worked was when he got it right. So he was asked, where does the formula come from?

His answer, it doesn't matter where it comes from. It works. It's the right formula.

And how do you know it's the right formula? Because it works. It gives the right results.

Well, how do you know that it's giving the right answers? Well, they line up with experiment.

So that was the attitude, the kind of freewheeling mathematical, not really grounded in any fundamental physical theory approach that Feynman was taking. And the attendees there did not find that very satisfying either.

Dyson’s Series

Now, about a year later, young British physicist Freeman Dyson noted and argued that you could treat the whole problem as being a perturbation theory. And this is kind of common in physics where if you have a small correction factor, you can look at a power series where you take a linear term and a square term, cube term, and so forth, just add those up in order to get the right corrections.

And he showed that effectively the Schwinger approach and the Feynman approach were equivalent. Well, Dirac's reaction was to say, “how do they manage with these incorrect equations? These equations lead to infinities when one tries to solve them. These infinities ought not to be there. They remove them artificially. Just because the results happen to be in agreement with observations does not prove that one's theory is correct.”

And I like this other comment that “I am very dissatisfied with the situation because this so-called ‘good theory’ does involve neglecting infinities which appear in its equations, ignoring them in an arbitrary way. This is just not sensible mathematics. Sensible mathematics involves disregarding a quantity when it is small, not neglecting it just because it is infinitely great and you do not want it!”

Oppenheimer, now this is Dyson talking about Oppenheimer's reaction. Oppenheimer “did not believe that the ideas of Schwinger and Feynman had much to do with reality. I had known that he had never appreciated Feynman, but it came as a shock to hear him now violently opposing Schwinger, his own student, whose work he had acclaimed so enthusiastically six months earlier. He had somehow become convinced during his stay in Europe that physics was in need of radically new ideas, that this quantum electrodynamics of Schwinger and Feynman was just another misguided attempt to patch up old ideas with fancy mathematics.”

Fermi, well, his reaction was to say “there are two ways of doing calculations in physics. One way, the way he prefers, is to have a clear physical picture of the process that you're calculating. The other way is to have a precise and self-consistent mathematical formalism. You have neither.”

When Dyson tried to counter by pointing out the agreement between the experiment and the theory, Fermi asked how many free parameters were used in order to obtain it. Four, Dyson said. Fermi remarked, “I remember my old friend Johnny von Neumann used to say with four parameters, I can fit an elephant. And with five, I can make him wiggle his trunk.”

So very soon the technique was being applied to meson problems, because that was the heavier subatomic particles in understanding how they behaved. And even Feynman was skeptical of that, because the whole idea of a series expansion works only when the parameter that you're expanding here is very, very small. If it starts to get very large, like in nuclear force attractions, it doesn't really apply at all.

And Feynman's remark was, don't believe any calculation in Meson theory that uses a Feynman diagram. Take a look at a modern nuclear physics book that's describing this, and you'll see Feynman diagrams all over the place.

Experiment and Theory Pursue Each Other

Well, let's go back to QED and this calculation of the anomalous electron moment, or the G factor. So there were some new experimental results. We had Schwinger's prediction here, which lined up beautifully with the 1947 result. But then, in 1949, Gardner and Purcell got a new, different, lower result inconsistent with the theory.

So, of course, the natural thing to do was to use the power series, calculate the next term, and see if they could get it to align. And two independent calculations by Kroll and Karplus, two associates of Feynman, independently did the calculation separately and then noted, yep, we got the same answer. And that was the answer, and they restored the agreement between QED and the experimental measurement. QED triumphs.

Well, then a little wrinkle popped up because Dyson proved that his series was inherently divergent even after you do the renormalization of math. So the whole process involves using a series that's inherently divergent. And you can cut it off arbitrarily at a certain point and get answers all over the place. But in theory, if you added up all the terms, you'd have an infinite result. So it really, the answer you get depends on where you happen to stop in summing up the terms.

Well, then there was a little bit of a wrinkle here. Because six years after Kroll and Karplus independently obtained their result, it was a new measurement that said, no, we're closer to the old measurement. So the result that they did involved summing up a large number of Feynman diagrams. I provided a little sketch there. Very complicated calculation.

And when a bunch of people redid it, they discovered, well, What they discovered is Kroll and Karplus worked together on the problem and kept working together on the problem until the answer they had mutually come up with… ended up being in alignment with the experimental theory, so that's what they reported. And, you know, Feynman kind of glossed over that, well, you know, they happened to iron out the differences between their calculations so they weren't really independent.

I mean, that's really soft peddling it. They claimed it was independent, and they lied, and they worked together on it, and they very clearly ended up with just reporting an arbitrary theoretical prediction to align with the experimental result that was back there.

And it took six years for anyone to notice that there was a problem with that calculation.

So, in 1957, Peterman and Sommerfeld both independently (and I think it really was) came up with a different calculation. You'll notice there's a little bit of a difference between minus 2.9 and minus 0.38, like a factor of 10. But that got the alignment back more or less close to the experimental result.

Well, then in 1961, we got a more accurate measurement from a Michigan team, very precise measurement. And you'll notice they had a very, very tight error bound on their answer, a very, very tight error bound on their answer that excluded the theoretical value. But they went back into their experiment and reanalyzed it and were able to figure out some other possible sources of error and reported an error bound that was much larger and large enough to include the theoretical answer.

Well, then in 1963, we had another experiment that reported almost exact agreement with the solution of 1957.

The Nobel Prize

And as a result, the Nobel Prize was awarded to the pioneers in quantum electrodynamics shared by Feynman, Schwinger, and a Japanese physicist, Shinichiro Tomonaga.

Well, then, a decade or so later, some more accurate measurements started to come out that started to call the old theoretical answer into question. And people started to calculate what that third coefficient in the series would be. But the initial calculation clearly wasn't helping and would only make matters worse.

Finally, in 1996, and this is a measure of how complicated this is, requiring computer assistants to calculate all the equations involved with each of the Feynman diagrams that are involved in calculating one of those coefficients. Finally, in 1996, there was a report of a new calculation of that C3 coefficient, and we got alignment of theory and agreement yet again.

Well, the problem is when people started going further and trying to calculate the next two agreements, or the next two coefficients, no one was able to get that to work out. They just would not align with the theoretical, with the experimental results.

So they added three new fudge factors, provided a justification for them, and once again managed to align the theoretical result with the experimental measurement.

So the result is today we have the crown jewel of physics with 12-digit agreement between theory and experiment that if you try to apply it to a muon, which is kind of a heavier cousin of the electron, it doesn't work and no one knows how to fix it.

QED: A Summary

So that's what physicists were doing in electromagnetics after World War II.

Now, to summarize, Feynman said, we found nothing wrong with the theory of quantum electrodynamics. It is therefore, I would say, the jewel of physics our proudest profession.

But in a little more candid moment, he said, the shell game that we play is technically called renormalization, but no matter how clever the word, it is still what I would call a dippy process. Having to resort to such hocus-pocus has prevented us from proving that the theory of quantum electrodynamics is mathematically self-consistent. It's surprising that the theory still hasn't been proved self-consistent one way or the other by now. I suspect that renormalization is not mathematically legitimate.

Dyson was a little more honest, and this is in 2006. He commented, as one of the inventors of QED, I remember that we thought a QED in 1949 as a temporary and jerry-built structure with mathematical inconsistencies and renormalized infinities swept under the rug. We did not expect it to last more than 10 years before something more solidly built theory would replace it. Now, 57 years have gone by, and that ramshackle structure still stands.

Progress in Applied Electromagnetism

So what was going on in applied electromagnetism? Well, one key concept is the concept of impedance. Now, this was familiar to circuit engineers. That's just the ratio of voltage to current for AC circuits, which is referred to as impedance.

Well, a Russian-American mathematician who worked for Bell Labs, Sergei Schelkunoff, noted that you could take that concept and you could apply it to fields and define a field impedance that's the ratio of the electric to the magnetic fields. It allows extending all the useful practice and techniques that we have dealing with impedance in electrical circuits and apply them to fields.

A key factor that very few people appreciate, it is an attribute of the field as well as of the medium. So, for instance, in free space, the impedance of free space is 376 ohms. So if you have an electromagnetic wave of whatever frequency, the ratio of its electric to magnetic field in free space, 376.7, et cetera, ohms.

But if that field is interacting with another field, if you have a constructive or a destructive interference where you're shifting that balance between the electric and magnetic energy, it can be anything. It could be an open. It could be a short. It's a property of the field as well as of the medium itself.

Smith Charts

And you could generalize this to a one-dimensional transmission line to understand electromagnetic field problems and analyze them kind of as easily as you would a transmission line.

So, for instance, If you studied electrical engineering, and I think most every engineer gets a little bit of this AC theory when they're in their undergraduate career, you can take a look at a signal. Now, in this case, we're talking electric fields and magnetic fields. You probably saw it as voltages and currents. And if there's a little bit of a phase difference between them, you have the energy or power going forward and then back if they have the same sign.

So you get energy moving in this pattern down here. And you can calculate what the energy velocity is as a result of the amplitudes of those two fields. And it's really kind of interesting how if you have the two fields in quadrature, 90-degree phase difference between them, you end up with the energy just oscillating in and out, and there's no net energy flow. That's referred to as reactive energy.

And then as you start to align the phases closer and closer, you get to the point where they're exactly in phase, and all that energy is moving. It's pure real power or real energy moving down the transmission line.

Well, there's a very clever technique that a gentleman named Philip Hager Smith came up with to plot these on this very artistically, aesthetically pleasing chart called the Smith Chart. And you can take a whole undergraduate class in what this is and what this means and how to use this. So I'll summarize a little bit of the basics just to give you a flavor for it.

It's effectively a polar plot of the reflection coefficient in complex space for circuits. So if you have a perfectly matched circuit with no reflection, the system that you're at is right there at the bullseye of your Smith chart. If you're on the rim, the magnitude of the reflection coefficient is 1, but it can be plus 1 here. It's complex, so it can be plus j, which electrical engineers use instead of i. You'll minus one there, minus J there.

So it's kind of a bull's eye, in effect, helping an electrical engineer or microwave engineer design a match to an electrical system like an antenna. So over here, at that point, you're dealing with an open on the transmission line. At this point, you're dealing with a short, like the two conductors connected together. Again, the middle is a matched load. If you are above the line, you are inductive or magnetic. If you are below the line, you are capacitive.

And this is how all these complicated circuit calculations were done before people had computers. They'd draw pictures of them on Smith charts. So what they would do is get an admittance chart, which you get by flipping, the inverse of the Smith chart, they'd lay them both down here. And then if you have a mismatched point that you're trying to get matched to the ideal impedance at the origin, you can add a parallel capacitance to move it this way. You can add a series inductance to move it that way. a parallel inductance that way, and a series capacitance that way.

So by concatenating the capacitors and inductors and series and parallel, you can basically maneuver that point to line it up where you want it to be. It's a very powerful graphical technique. And even with computers, electrical engineers still look at things on Smith charts just because of the power of being able to intuit what's going on.

Simple problem. This is a consulting job that I had. I was asked to design a UHF TV antenna. And I designed the antenna. I did my best to make it ultra wide band and with a really good match. But I got this really crappy voltage standing wave ratio. Two is kind of a marginal match. And you can see it's going all over the place there.

But you can see on the Smith chart, it's pretty well localized. And if I'm down here in capacitive territory, if I add a little bit of inductance, I can bring that up and hopefully hit the bullseye. So that's exactly what I did. I tried a couple different inductors in series with the antenna. And you can see how the larger the inductor, the more it got pulled up. And somewhere in between there, before overshooting, I had a really good match.

So that's kind of a practical example of how you would use the Smith chart.

Dipole Impedance

So let's go back to Schelkunoff and his colleague, Harold Friis. Another thing that physicists don't appreciate is Schelkunoff 's colleague, Friis, came up with this equation that's on the board, Friis's equation for working out the received power as a function of the transmit power, knowing antenna properties like the apertures of the antenna and the wavelength and the distance apart they are.

But they focused on the dipole equations, you know, the same equations that are still mentioned in Jackson and Stratton alike, but focused on the complex impedances that you get for an electric and magnetic dipole. This is like on the axis of the dipole.

Dipole Energy Flow

And if you take those impedances, and calculate the time domain energy flow, you see some very interesting features. I'll just focus on this diagram on the right. This is a space-time energy flow diagram. The horizontal axis is distance from the dipole oscillator that's at the origin. In the space-time diagram, we scale it so the speed of light is 45 degrees.

So what you see here is energy oscillating in and out close to that dipole, breaking off and then decoupling and moving away. And this is a little bit confusing to someone who thinks in terms of Feynman diagrams, and I've got a point charge, and we jiggle this point charge, and out pops a photon, and it moves away at the speed of light. Because what this is showing is the energy does not move at the speed of light. It's going almost stationary. relatively slowly, and it's only out here like a quarter wavelength or so away that it's decoupling and starting to move at the speed of light.

That radiation process isn't just a point charge spitting out a point photon. It's a much more complex physical process that really isn't appreciated by physicists.

Dipole Impedance

So you can take a look at that dipole impedance And this is scaled to the impedance of free space. So if you're far enough away from the antenna, all the fields are at the impedance of free space. But if you have an electric antenna, you have a very electric impedance up close, very strong electric fields. If you have a magnetic dipole antenna, you have a very low impedance because it's mostly magnetic. Remember, E over H, so if the H is very big, the impedance is very small.

And you can see how they converge by the time. This is about a sixth of a wavelength away. They kind of overshoot. And this is in units of lambda over 2 pi, which are used a lot. So this is about a sixth of a wavelength. And by the time you're about a wavelength or so away, you can see the impedance converges to free space.

Interesting thing is you can look at the phase and the power factor. Now, again, this power factor and these phase differences for reactive fields are things that electrical engineers learn in their basic circuit theory classes. If you go very close to the dipole, the phase difference between the electric and magnetic fields is 90 degrees.

As you move this curve I'm sorry, the top curve, 90 degrees, and then as you move out into the far field, you get closer and closer, that phase being zero, to have the fields aligned and have real power associated with them. Well, there's a power factor associated with that, just like you'd have in an AC power circuit. where you start off not having much real power, and only as you start to get a half wavelength or so away do you have real power flow.

So this whole process of radiation has a great many subtleties that are really not appreciated by physicists.

The Schelkunoff-Smith Chart

Now, what you can do is you can take those impedances for an electric dipole or a magnetic dipole, and you can plot them on a Smith chart. Now, this Smith chart is modified. It's actually called a Smith-Carter chart because it shows those phase difference curves. So if you had a plus or minus 90 degree phase curve, it's purely reactive. You're on the border of the Smith chart.

The bullseye there is the 376 ohms free space impedance. As you start to get to kr equal 1, that's a sixth of a wavelength, you have a 45 degree phase difference. As you get out to about 5 times kr, that's about 5 sixth of a wavelength, you're getting pretty well matched.

So you can plot those impedance relationships associated with the radiation of electromagnetic energy from a small antenna on a Smith chart. In fact, I use this as my little personal sigil on my web page; I think it's such a cool diagram.

And if you take a look at that, it helps you calculate that that power factor is just the inverse of the quality factor, and you can work out for a given size of dipole what the efficiency is going to be and what the gain of the antenna is going to be. So just based on knowing the field impedance, the size, and the quality factor, you can tell how good an antenna that you can make and what those limits are.

Electromagnetic Waves and How They Interfere

Well, I presented a little bit of this last time, but I want to review because, again, many people just don't understand what an electromagnetic wave is. It's, of course, a combination of an electric wave and a magnetic wave at right angles to each other. Normally, they have equal amounts of energy, equal electric and equal magnetic.

But when you start to interfere, you end up with concentrations of electric or magnetic energy. If you have a constructive interference of two waves coming together, you'll notice you have double the electric field. Well, the problem with that is the energy goes as the field squared, so you have four times the electric energy. But it's not the electric energy that's conserved, it's the total energy.

And you'll notice that the magnetic fields cancel out. Now, if you look at your right-hand rule, E cross H, you can see how the vectors work out there. So in a constructive interference, that balance of electric and magnetic energy becomes purely electric.

If you look at a destructive interference, so now the electric fields are going to cancel out, but what happens is the magnetic field is going to reinforce.

So you have the electric energy turning into magnetic energy. But the thing that's really interesting about this is that the energy is stopping when you have only one field. A static field means the energy isn't moving at all. You know, E cross H telling you the power flow, if E or H is zero, it's not going anywhere.

You can relate that back to the normalized energy velocity. And I had to put some equations in the chart, or they'd revoke my PhD.

The Great Circle of Electromagnetism

So this is an interesting observation that if you take this quantity called the normalized Lagrangian, the difference between the electric and magnetic field energy, and you divide it by the total energy, that is equal to plus one if you are electrostatic, and minus one if you are magnetostatic, and zero if you have a balance of energy that's associated with radiation.

And you can compare that to the normalized energy velocity, where the energy is either going backwards at the speed of light, minus 1, or forwards at the speed of light, plus 1. And if you square those two quantities and add them together, you get the equation of a unit circle.

So all of these one-dimensional problems where electric and magnetic fields are interfering with each other, you can plot on that great circle of electromagnetism. And physicists normally think only in terms of radiation or only in terms of electrostatics. And it's very rare that anyone actually traces exactly what's happening between going from an electrostatic case to radiation.

Or, for instance, a forward wave interacts with an open. It becomes electrostatic. It reflects off of it. It turns around and becomes a reverse wave bouncing off of that open. All that physics is not appreciated by most physicists.

So the key thing is the energy is not following the fields. It's following the superposition of the fields working together. So the waves and the fields always move at the speed of light. We can't have them stopping and then going faster than the speed of light to catch up. What's happening is the energy slows down, stops, and changes direction.

Two Waves Interfering

So, for instance, if we have two waves coming together and we look at how they interact on the space-time energy diagram, we have a goes-down, goes-up wave interfering with a goes-up, goes-down wave. As the two goes-ups interfere, we get an electrostatic node. The energy stops and changes direction. As the two waves align perfectly, they cancel out, and we have a magnetostatic node as the energy comes to a rest. As we pull them apart, the two goes-downs line up electrostatically.

And if you take a look at the energy flow, the two waves pass through each other at the speed of light, but in doing so, they are exchanging energy. And that is a concept that's completely foreign to thinking of electromagnetic waves in terms of just point photons that are moving with fields at the speed of light.

I'm going to run out of time here, so I'm going to have to kind of fast forward through some more complicated examples and just summarize that what physicists don't know about electromagnetism is concepts like impedance, Smith charts, antenna limits, and energy flow, how fields and energy are two different quantities that move in different ways.

And so looking at something like this, we're looking at how the energy radiates away from a dipole. That's a detailed depiction of how electromagnetic energy radiates from a source. A Feynman diagram is a mnemonic aid for tracking successive terms in a dubious perturbation algorithm. It's not a fundamental picture of the underlying fundamental reality.

What About Quantum Mechanics?

So the key interesting thing here is how this addresses the problem of wave particle duality in the same way Louis de Broglie proposed way back in the 1920s with his pilot wave theory.

The concept that, as he described it, a photon coming from one laser or the other interfering is guided by the superposition of the waves emitted by the two lasers. And that solves, for instance, the paradox of the two-slit experiment. where you have the superposition of waves going through both slits, guiding the photon through one or the other on a particular distinct path.

You can see an electromagnetic calculation I did showing the energy flow in a two-slit interference and the predictions of the pilot waves for how those trajectories work in a two-slit experiment doing the calculation quantum mechanically. And they're qualitatively very similar.

So if you have the two slits, The fields go through both slits. They generate an interference pattern with many possible trajectories. And then as a photon goes through, it happens to pick one of those trajectories and end up in the interference pattern on the screen.

Want to Learn More?

So if you're interested in learning more about this novel take on physics, You can see a lot of this in my book, The Art and Science of Ultrawideband Antennas, which I probably should have subtitled An Introduction to Time Domain Electromagnetics and Energy Flow, because that's really the key concept that underlies that.

A lot of the fundamental ideas, including that great circle of electromagnetics and how that plays out in a variety of problems, are in this article from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London from 2018. That's available free and online.

Again, I recommend Oliver Konza's article on the state of QED if you want to understand and go into more detail on the remarkable way in which that theory was devised.

I will plug my book sale that I coordinate that's running right now. You can go to my website, ethersar.com. There are almost 200 books there that are free or 99 cents from fellow indie authors, including the first book in my series, The Hidden Truth. If you like alternate history conspiracy techno thrillers, that's the series for you.

And more recently, my latest project is The Wise of Heart, a modern day reimagining of the Scopes trial amid the transgender mania. So a high school biology teacher decides to serve a test case for a law mandating not teaching the biology of sex in favor of having mandatory gender affirmation. And the resulting trial attracts national attention from Major politicians and a media circus reporting on it.

And ironically enough, this story about a high school teacher getting silenced for teaching the biology of sex kind of played out in real life. Because after the project was fully funded on Kickstarter, Kickstarter canceled it. So I replatformed on a site, “fundmycomic.” I can't say enough good things about those people. I ended up with well over double what I had when Kickstarter canceled me, thanks to the resulting publicity on everywhere from Fox News and The Blaze and bounding into comics and upstream reviews.

I'm glad to report that the books arrived yesterday just in time. And I'm going to begin fulfilling to the backers. I've already fulfilled two copies to backers who happen to be here. And there will be copies available on Author's Alley from 6 to 9 o'clock tomorrow, where I have my book sale and signing.

So if you're interested in contacting me, my contact information is here. And I'll leave that up while I ask if there are any questions. Yes?

Questions:

Am I the only one looking at the development of QED and thinking of circles and epicycles?

I had no idea when I went through grad school the shaky foundation that it was on. I mean, it's very few people, if any, can follow the calculations. They are not reported in enough detail in a journal article for anyone to be able to follow along and check their accuracy. Even back in the 1950s, we saw the simple calculations sliding past all the best physicists in the world for a half dozen years before anyone noticed there was a problem.

And really, they only noticed there was a problem because the experimental result was getting out of line with the theory, and that prompted a second look at it. I do not trust QED at all as being a fundamental theory of how electromagnetics works.

I guess we need a Kepler.

I'm sorry?

I guess we need a Kepler.

Yes, we do. Yes.

If you don't trust it, how do you break it?

Well, I think it's broken. You just need to come up with a better explanation for how it works.

This is HDI. How can you create an experiment where the QED people can't get the answer every time?

I don't think you can.

The muon data is already doing that.

Well, yeah. But you can arbitrarily fit at least one set of data, the electron data. But yeah, as Jeff points out, the muon data is inconsistent with how QED works. So there's clearly a problem with QED. The only question is, what's the replacement theory, or how can we fix that problem and come up with the right answer that will apply to both electrons and muons?

Yes?

Well, speaking of somebody who's a complete civilian, the one thing that strikes me is it's almost like they're trying to fit the equation to the experiment not understand what caused the experiment to have that value, and then from that divide...

And that is a long-standing problem in physics that I talked about in a little more detail last year in my talk, but when Heisenberg first came up with his matrix methods for dealing with quantum mechanics back in the 1920s, effectively you had an input or a starting state vector, you applied a matrix to it, you got an output state. There was no physical picture about what's going on. It was a mathematical black box, and it worked. It got the right answer.

And then de Broglie took a look at that, and he was having trouble following it, and he had the brilliant observation, you know, Einstein got the Nobel Prize for demonstrating the photoelectric effect for demonstrating that light had a particle-like nature. If light has a particle-like nature, maybe particles have a light or a wave-like nature. And he came up with his idea of a de Broglie wavelength associated with the electron. And yeah, that worked brilliantly.

And then Schrodinger took that and came up with the Schrodinger equation. And all of a sudden, you had a picture of quantum mechanics where you kind of sort of saw there's things that are happening in space that we can assign to particular locations in particular, probability densities, and so forth.

But it's kind of a long story that I don't have time to answer here that I addressed last time. But there was a profound philosophical prejudice against that perspective. I got to talk with John Wheeler, who was Feynman's PhD advisor and a noted expert on quantum measurement theory in his 80s, proudly proclaiming he would go anywhere to understand quantum theory. He doesn't have to worry about his reputation. He'll entertain any idea, no matter how wild, to try to answer the problems associated with quantum measurement.

And I asked him, so what do you think of pilot wave theory? And he said, the screwdriver theory of quantum mechanics. I kind of scratched my head about that and said, well, have you written some more analysis of this that I could read, understand why you don't like it? His answer to me was, you know, I really ought to look into that sometimes so I can tell what's wrong with it.

And I don't think he was alone in that attitude. I think a great many, in fact, most physicists had the attitude that Bohr and Heisenberg and the Copenhagen interpretation and all the quantum subjectivism was the rule of the day and it was only the poor reactionary people who could not grasp the wondrous nature of their mystical quantum interpretations who were having trouble with this and needed the screwdriver theory and the epicycles of pilot waves to explain it for them and make them have their security blanket to make them comfortable with quantum mechanics.

Yeah, that's definitely the case. Any other questions? Yes.

Unintelligible…

Yeah. Oh, it pops up all over the place. That's a very natural thing to do. Right, but it makes sense. But then... It is calculated from adding up contributions due to various Feynman diagrams. And I showed a picture of, was it the C C2 or C3, where it's a handful of a dozen or so diagrams. And it took some very brilliant people a couple years to crank through them all.

By the time you're getting to C4 and C5, I think it was something like 72,000 separate Feynman diagrams that you have to run through and catalog. And that's why it took a supercomputer to go and do that. And then you have to worry about, yeah, and are you being consistent in how you're removing your You know, renormalizing and removing the infinities. And if you do it a little different way, you're going to get a different answer. And what's the right way? Well, which way agrees with the experiment? That's the right way.

We have about five minutes left. Any other questions in the back? Yes.

There was a physical interpretation or a liquid drop version of pilot wave theory that people were looking at that subsequently had some issues. The reason most people, most physicists I've talked to about this reject pilot wave theory is when you start to try to apply it to many body problems. All of a sudden, it turns out to no longer be waves in three-dimensional space that make lots of intuitive sense. It's all kinds of waves added up in some abstract phase space representation.

And frankly, knowing how hard it is even classically to address what's called the three-body problem or the lunar problem. It took some very solid math, which frankly is beyond me, just to handle the three-body problem of correctly calculating the lunar orbit and all the perturbations that you get between the sun and the earth tugging on it.

Many body problems are very complicated. You know, the fact that a many body pilot wave problem is very complicated doesn't convince me that it's not the right approach.

Yes?

Are magnetic monopoles possible?

Not if, you know, Gauss's law of magnetism is correct, which has been tested to a pretty high degree of accuracy. Now I know people have come up or have found some anomalous results that they like to interpret as magnetic monopoles. So it's possible, but I don't think there's convincing evidence for it.

Yes?

It's more of an observation and a question. I mean, this issue of when you take a perturbation theory and you start adding terms and it sort of becomes, it gets a little better for a while and then if you have more terms, it gets a little worse is not unique to this franchise.

Yeah, that's, yeah.

To make an example, you know, when you take the major scope situations for fluid as well and you start looking at extending them into a lower or lower half of each regime, when you add the first direction terms, it makes it better. When you have the second correction, the fifth is a little better. When you have the third and beyond the correction, the fifth is dramatically worse.

Right. And that's just the universe telling you that that's because you're trying to extend the theory beyond the domain in which the assumptions of the theory apply and you should do something else.

Right. And I think what quantum electrodynamics is telling us is you should do something else.

Yeah.

Okay. Our time is up. Thank you for being such an attentive audience. Thank you.

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History is never just a record of facts. These talks examine how false narratives arise through omission, distortion, and misinterpretation, often to serve political, ideological, or cultural interests.

Transcript:

My name is Hans Schantz. This is part three of the lectures that we had this morning, all on the theme of history as narrative.

I'm going to be talking about where physics went wrong and explaining how physics, as with history, is essentially a narrative. And it depends who is writing that narrative and for what purposes. If you ask Tolkien, for instance, what happened in modern physics, we could end up with a story of how the orcs invaded modern physics and how the classical physicist elves and dwarves resisted heroically. And if this was the only story we'd have, we could have our own Beowulf of modern physics, a thousand years from now.

Napoleon said that history is a set of lies agreed upon. I thought that was a great quote to start my presentation with because as I dug into it, he probably never said that at all. So that really makes it all the more poignant.

So what I'm going to do is talk about, I'm going to present the conventional wisdom, the story of modern physics as you will learn in a conventional book or in school. And then I'll talk about what really happened, at least as best I understand, going into all the details from special relativity through to quantum mechanics. And in particular, I'm going to highlight an interpretation of quantum mechanics called the pilot wave interpretation and show what happened to the pilot wave interpretation that is the basis of my work in electromagnetism to try to apply electromagnetic ideas of fields and energy flow back to understanding quantum mechanics.

So I'll begin with the conventional wisdom. The conventional story of modern physics is that we started off with Newtonian physics, and it's really encapsulated by what Pierre Simon-Laplace had to say. His concept was that if we had an intelligence that knew where all the particles in the universe were, and what all their velocities were, and what all the forces were that acted on them, we can predict with absolute certainty how the course of the universe would evolve forward from there. So that was the classical Newtonian certainty.

Physicists made all of these discoveries of atomic physics. They saw all of the energy levels in the hydrogen atom, that it was discrete and quantized and not a continuum. Planck had to argue that energy came in discrete lumps called photons. All of these atomic discoveries forced physicists out of their classical certainty and forced them to adopt a statistical probabilistic view of reality where we can't ever really know anything for sure. We can't assume that just because we know the present we can calculate the future. That's no longer an aspect of physics and quantum mechanics has proven that that is the case. That's the conventional wisdom.

So now let's go back and see the rest of the story, what really happened.

We'll begin with the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887. The two gentlemen behind me there set up an interferometer. They spun it around to see if there was a difference in the path lengths between the rays of light that going one way or going at a right angle. And what they found was they didn't see any shifts in the fringes or the phase of the light that would be consistent with their theory that we were moving through an ether that would tend to slow down the light going in one direction. Well, Heaviside had already predicted that a moving electrified sphere would contract in the direction that it's moved. And Fitzgerald took that idea and ran with it, speculating that, well, perhaps the interferometer is shrinking or expanding depending on its relative motion through the ether. Larmor also used electromagnetic concepts to predict the concept of time dilation and developed transformations for how to handle the electrodynamics of moving bodies. That was brought to fruition in 1904 by Lorentz, who came up with what we now call the Lorentz transforms to explain the geometry of how you can understand moving bodies in electrodynamics. And in fact, in 1904, French physicist Henri Poincaré coined the term the principle of relativity to describe the new mechanics that we were going to have to explain all of this, a mechanics in which the speed of light cannot be exceeded, it represents a maximum speed limit. So that's the precursor.

Well then, along came an obscure Swiss patent clerk who had read Poincaré and read Mach and wrote a paper on the electrodynamics of moving bodies, where he took that long line of argument of people looking to electromagnetics and trying to figure out how moving bodies work electromagnetically. And he realized that he could predict all of that from two premises, from the premise the speed of light is constant for all observers and the premise that the laws of physics look the same for all observers in all inertial reference frames.

Ernst Mach had come up with this idea of kind of building on the idea of positivism. Mach offered a kind of empirical skepticism arguing all we really know are our sensations. All we really know is what we see, the data that we gather from reality, and it's useless to speculate about what's “really going on” because our senses are a wall that prevent us from understanding all that stuff. Atoms are a convenient fiction that allow us to simplify the bundles of sense perceptions we get as we're watching chemical reactions taking place. Ironically, he never accepted, Mach never accepted special relativity either. Anyway, a young student, Einstein, took those ideas and ran with it and decided to take an observer-first approach to the electrodynamics of moving bodies to look at how the speed of light seems to be constant, how the laws of physics seem to be the same. Now that Machian view led to a philosophical school called logical positivism, which you can see a few decades later being brought to a fruition by James Jeans, the idea that physicists can never penetrate beyond our impressions. We can never understand what really happened.

Well, fast forward 10 years, Einstein came up with special relativity in 1905. He wanted to generalize special relativity to accelerated bodies and came up with a theory of general relativity in 1915. The theory of general relativity, I think was best explained by John Archibald Wheeler, was one of the pioneers in the modern understanding of general relativity.

Wheeler said that general relativity can be summed up by saying, space-time tells matter how to move, and matter and energy tell space-time how to curve. You've seen the rubberized sheet with a ball on it analogy. It creates this curvature on that plane, and then that governs or influences how particles move on the plane. That's the basic concept.

Fast forward another 10 years and what happened is Einstein realized that his theory of general relativity was very much like an ether. He had dispelled the ether from special relativity. He went to what can we observe and came up with those two principles of special relativity. The consequence of that is what we don't need a mechanism, we don't need a process. It just happens. Here are the equations, shut up and calculate.

But he realized that what he was doing in general relativity, assigning the curvature to space, was very much like an ether, assigning properties to this supposedly empty space.

And that started Einstein along the road to having some doubts about that program. In 1925, Heisenberg came to Berlin delivering one of his first lectures on quantum mechanics. And we didn't find out about this until many years after Einstein was dead, around 1970 or so, Heisenberg published his memoirs, Physics and Beyond, and he described what happened. And Heisenberg said Einstein invited him back to Einstein's apartment after the talk and proceeded to ask Heisenberg, well, how can you have this model of what goes on in atom? Where are the electrons? What path are the electrons taking? And Heisenberg proudly told him there are no electron paths in my model. I'm focusing specifically on the observation, on what we observe before the process and what we observe after the process.

And what happens in between? That's not part of my theory at all. Einstein objected that, the electron's gotta be somewhere. Why don't we take a look at trying to figure out where that is? And Heisenberg proceeded to quote Einstein back at Einstein and go through a lot of his work on relativity and point out, that's exactly the attitude that you had, that we should focus on the observations, that we should not entertain these idle metaphysical speculations about what really goes on in between. So my theory is in your tradition and you're following in your footsteps in presenting an observables first theory of how quantum world works. And according to Heisenberg, Einstein was taken aback by that and said, “well, perhaps I did use such a philosophy earlier and also wrote it, but it's all nonsense, just the same.” That was really the break for Einstein from quantum mechanics going forward. But it's also important to realize it's not just a matter of Einstein introducing this Ernst Machian positivism into physics. There was a long strand of very similar thinking present in German physics of the day.

So I've got three famous German physicists in the early 20s before Heisenberg came up with this theory of quantum mechanics. We have Wilhelm Wien saying causality has nothing to do with the business, meaning physics. You have Walter Schottky saying that elementary acts of emission and absorption are indeterminate, without direct cause and without direct effect, that they are outside the relation of cause and effect. And you have Walter Nernst kind of colorfully saying that the conception of the principle of causality is an absolutely rigorous law of nature, “laced the spirit in Spanish boots,” the torture instrument of the Inquisition, that you wrap around feet and squeeze them painfully in order to extort a confession.

And it is therefore at present the obligation of research and natural sciences to loosen these fetters sufficiently so that the free stride of philosophic thought is no longer hindered. Well, that was such an over-the-top comment that he made. And I ran across that, goodness, 30 years ago when I was in grad school. I just kind of pegged at it as Man, those people were over the top.

But then I found where it came from. It comes from Goethe. It comes specifically from Goethe's Faust. And the reason I tracked this down is because Heisenberg specifically cited this passage, well an extended version of this passage, I just pulled an excerpt of it for you. He explicitly cited this where Mephistopheles or Satan is whispering into Faust's ear and telling him to take a course of logic; that will lace your mind in Spanish boots so that you will creep along the path of thought and not go will-o-wisping one way or the other. And that was taken to heart by German scientists who saw that as an example of what not to do. You have to unlace the Spanish boots and have a free stride of even logically paradoxical concepts as we're approaching our science. And that was really one of the reasons why that mode of thinking in quantum mechanics found fertile ground in Germany in the period.

So let's talk a little more about how quantum mechanics and modern physics arose. I was really stunned when I started reading the biographies of physicists in the 1920s, where they'd say, oh, I got a Rockefeller Foundation grant to go to the Copenhagen Institute and learn from Moore. And I saw that over and over and over. And basically, every physicist, every American physicist of the period had a line in their biography saying, and then I got a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation to go study with Bohr. And I looked into it, and it turned out the Rockefeller Foundation actually funded the Copenhagen Institute, and they were one of the large sources of funding. Now I haven't found anything further about motivations or why they did it. If you read what they said, well, put the money in the hands of the best people or we'll have the best effect. I mean, there's no obvious motivation. There are other places where, for instance, they were deliberately funding the teaching of US history in order to push certain agendas. I found that in some other areas. I have not found the smoking gun specifically, but it is very interesting that they were funding the Copenhagen Interpretation.

At the 5th Solvay Conference is where all of this really came to a head, and Einstein had a famous showdown with Bohr. This is where Einstein famously argued God does not play dice, and Bohr is supposed to have told Einstein to stop telling God what to do. Now that argument kind of stole all the oxygen out of the air there, but what also was going on was a French physicist named Broglie come up with the concept of pilot waves.

So he came up with the idea that if you have, like for instance, two slits and you have light shining on it, that the light, the energy, the photons of light are guided by what he called pilot waves. So the pilot waves go through both slits, they set up an interference pattern, and then the photon itself will take one of those trajectories that you see lined up on the plot and end up in the interference pattern. It's a nice, causal, well-behaved, easy to understand model of how quantum mechanics would work. But that ran completely counter to the whole, we're just going to look at observables and we're not going to consider any possible mechanism of how things might work.

Von Neumann, famous mathematician, came up with a supposed proof that there could be no hidden variables like de Broglie required in order to make this theory work. It turned out that proof was wrong and not less than three years later a mathematician and philosopher, Greta Herman, disproved it, but no one paid any attention until decades later that that had happened. In 1935, Einstein did what was probably his last and arguably maybe even his best work, working with Podolsky and Rosen. They wrote what's been called the EPR paper; they argued that quantum mechanics was not complete and had to have hidden variables. That's still his most cited paper.

Well, in the early 1950s, another physicist named David Bohm rediscovered deBroglie's, well independently rediscovered deBroglie's work and started to popularize it in physics. And that caused a lot of consternation. Bohm was a professor at Princeton, and the head of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton was this guy, J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer really didn't like Bohm's idea. At one time, legend has it, and un fortunately you have to read these as people's secondhand and thirdhand remembrances and memoirs, Oppenheimer supposedly handed Bohm’s paper to a grad student and told him go away and don't come back until you prove this is wrong and find a mistake in it. And the grad student came back and said, “Professor Oppenheimer, I can't find anything wrong with this.” So Oppenheimer took a look at it and he tried to find something wrong with it. And he couldn't find anything wrong with it either. So he convened a seminar and asked all the professors to come and spend a solid day going over the paper step by step by step and finding what was wrong with it so they could stick a stake through its heart and not have to speak about it or deal with it again. And they weren't able to do it. And one of the people at that conference said, Oppenheimer's reaction was, well, if we can't refute Bohm, we'll just have to agree to ignore him.

And if you hear stories like this, and the kind of fly in the face of your conception of how scientists could behave, it's almost very, very difficult to believe. And I would be very skeptical of these secondhand stories that pass down word of mouth and our writing and so forth, except that I was eyewitness to one of them because when I was in grad school, I had the good fortune to have John Wheeler on my doctoral committee.

And I had been very confused by quantum mechanics and the Copenhagen interpretation. And I just discovered pilot waves that made so much sense. So I went to Professor Wheeler, who in addition to his work on general relativity, had done a lot of work on quantum measurement theory. So surely if anyone knows the deep secret history of how this came down, he would. So I asked Professor Wheeler, what do you think of this pilot wave theory? And he scoffed….

“Ah, the screwdriver theory of physics.” I didn't quite understand for sure what he meant by that. I read criticisms of, it's adding scaffolding, it's putting in epicycles and deference to create this quasi-causal picture of what's happening for the reactionary physicists who are constitutionally incapable of grasping the wisdom of the Copenhagen interpretations. I read stuff like that, but I wanted to see what Wheeler had said on it. I asked him, “so can you point me to someplace where you talk about this so I can better understand what your objections are to the pilot wave approach?” It certainly made a lot of sense to me. And Wheeler looked away and he said, “You know, I never really studied into that business, and I really ought to so that I can tell what's wrong with it.”

And it was very clear to me that he and probably a lot of his contemporaries had just accepted this dismissal of pilot wave theory without seriously thinking of it. And in fact, I'm not the only one who noticed that. Nobel Prize winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann pointed out that Niels Bohr brainwashed a whole generation of physicists into ignoring the pilot wave approach and accepting that Bohr and his contemporaries at the Copenhagen institute and come up with solving all these problems associated with quantum mechanics.

I want to conclude by talking a little bit about the importance of the physics narrative. running through the center of the story, we have Albert Einstein, who has this amazing legacy as being, in some people's view, the most brilliant man who ever lived, who is the epitome of the greatest physicist of the era. His estate has earned a quarter billion dollars licensing Einstein’s image to date.

And if you have any questions about the significance of the Einstein legacy, this anecdote from Freeman Dyson really brought it home to me. Dyson describes how he was on the Princeton campus in December of 1981. Classes were out. The campus was alone. was a dark and rainy night, he says. And he sees this military truck in front of the Institute for Advanced Studies. And Israeli soldiers out there standing guard and some of going in and bringing crates down from the Institute for Advanced Study.

And then, you know, after they'd loaded all the crates into the truck, they climbed aboard the truck and drove off into the night. According to Dyson, that was the transfer of the Einstein archives to, you from the Institute of Advanced Study to the home where they are today, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. So, you know, the legacy was apparently important enough for (if we believe Freeman Dyson's account) that there was a military operation involved in moving his archives from Princeton to Israel.

So I've summarized the conventional wisdom, told you a little bit about the real story, about what's going on. If you are interested in learning more, I have the book for you. Book one is available at fundmycomic.com. You can pre-order it. I have some samples copies on the table in the back [Note: the campaign is now closed. Book I will be generally available in a couple of months].

You can leaf through it. That covers the fundamentals and origins of electromagnetism. Book two goes more into THIS material, where physics went wrong, and then book three talks about how electromagnetism and quantum mechanics work. Thank you, and I'll be happy to answer any questions.

Question: Why do you think the Rockefeller Foundation funded the Copenhagen Institute?

Oh, that's a good question. I don't know for sure. I think in part it was probably consistent with the zeitgeist of time. I've really looked more deeply into relativity and part of the deal with relativity is it is interpreted loosely by people who aren't working through Lorentz transforms. Relativity is physics “proving” that there are no absolute truths, that everything is relative, that physics has proven there are no absolute truths, and that was really the cultural message that was taken away from relativity. And quantum mechanics have much the same effect, that everything is probabilistic, you can't know anything for certain. And I can see how there would be advantages in promoting that view.

Now, from the perspective of my science fictional universe in The Hidden Truth, where evil cabals are trying to retard the course of science and to prevent scientific progress and discovery in ways that could upset the control or make it harder for people to control society, I would have a much easier time explaining that.

Question: So we did a Mosaic Ark episode on this, so I'm going to just give you the references. Eric Vogelin in 1948 wrote a very helpful and interesting paper called “The Origins of Scientism,” and does Hans' argument for Newton, right, and showing the way in which this sort of “shut up, you don't understand it,” was played on Newton as well, who was very valuable to Royal Society and to the Bank of England and to the projection of a certain kind of power, which is, think, what you're suggesting is going on with my experience.

I have to… I agree with that. That's why you'll find in book one, Fundamentals and Origins of Electromagnetism, I spend a lot of time talking about medieval history and about Francis Bacon, who was one of the pivotal figures in setting up the modern cult of scientism that is being criticized by Eric Vogelin in the context of Newtonian physics. That's that part of the story. And those forces are alive and well today trying to create a cult of science and use it as a tool for social control.

I have since incorporated that into my writing. Any other questions?

Question: What level of math and physics should we have to approach your book?

I try to keep it to a minimum as best I can. The only equations I have, I put into a figure for decorative purposes. And so if you are someone who's really serious, you can a look and say, those are Maxwell's equations. Here are the messy equations that Maxwell started with and here are the cleaned up versions that Heaviside derived. So even if you aren't familiar with vector theory you can say, “Wow Maxwell had an awful lot of equations. Boy Heaviside's aren’t nearly as messy.”

Question: There's a story about a physicist and there's a student who's flunking out and he says, but I understand about the cat. oh And the hero's response, the protagonist's response is, “the cat's just a story, you have to do the math.”

Not only is Schrodinger's cat just a story, but that is an example of one of the reductio ad absurdums that Schrodinger came up with to show how ridiculous quantum mechanics was. And a lot of the Copenhagen people said, “yeah, that's a really good example.” And the same thing can be said of Einstein and his concept of spooky action at a distance. That was supposed to be a criticism, not a description.

I'll take one last question.

Question: Perhaps a little tangential. oh The Schrodinger's Cat experiment was, it was like based on this idea that you could like actually literally measure a particle and connect that. And my understanding was that when you measured the particle and converted something macroscopic like a cat then that at that point there's no more seat position anymore anyway. Is that correct?

The answer is, it depends. You do have some people who would make that argument. There are other people who insist that the wave function collapses only when it is impinged upon through the interaction of a conscious observer. And then they argue, well, is our computer sensor that is recording the data in its database, is that conscious? Or is it still indeterminate until a human observer looks at the data in the database and sees what the answer was?

So there are any number of arguments on that subject along those lines.

Well, I want to thank you all for listening to my lecture on physics. History is a set of lies agreed upon and stories are everywhere. So storytellers, get ready to make your own stories.

Question: Yeah, I think read that. Lincoln said that on the internet. Do you know of any novels that deal with the Schrodinger’s Cat paradox?

Yes, there was one that was particularly good where the author pulled a bunch of quotes that were so ridiculous. knew we had to be making it up. Things like Einstein saying quantum mechanics oh “resembles the schemes of a delusional maniac and makes absolutely no sense.

I mean, it's just so over the top, it couldn't possibly be true. But I looked it up and it was. And Rob Kroese will be acquainted with the author whose works I was talking about: Schrodinger’s Gat.

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This meticulously researched post reveals how Einstein’s 1921 American tour, ostensibly a Zionist fundraising mission, transformed him into a cultural icon through a perfect storm of factors: a possible Edward Bernays publicity campaign, a fortunate misunderstanding where crowds gathering for Weizmann were assumed to be Einstein fans, tensions between assimilated and radical American Jews that led establishment media to promote Einstein while downplaying the Zionist cause, and Einstein’s natural charisma with reporters. The visit raised $750,000 for Hebrew University while cementing Einstein’s celebrity status, contributing to a broader 1920s cultural shift where science replaced religion as the ultimate authority: creating the paradox of scientific truth being used to argue that no absolute truth exists, with Einstein embodying this contradiction as a figure whose fame transcended his actual scientific contributions and who would later dismiss critics as antisemitic while holding views that might today be considered antisemitic himself.

This similarly extensively researched Substack post examines the historical concept of “Jewish physics,” beginning with Einstein’s own observations about distinctive Jewish intellectual traits and investigating whether relativity and quantum mechanics can truly be characterized as “Jewish science.” I demonstrate that both theories emerged from multicultural collaborations involving Jewish scientists like Einstein, Born, and Bohr alongside non-Jewish contributors like Heisenberg, Dirac, and Fermi, making ethnic categorization problematic. The post traces how legitimate scientific criticism of relativity became entangled with antisemitism through figures like Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark, who initially had cordial relationships with Einstein but later became opponents due to professional rivalries, personal tragedies, and political polarization during the Weimar Republic. I argue that what critics dismissed as “Jewish physics” - abstract, mathematical, removed from concrete models - was actually more influenced by German idealist philosophy and Austrian positivism, and I suggest that Einstein’s tendency to dismiss all critics as “ignorant or antisemitic” may have been counterproductive, contributing to the polarization that ultimately led to the Nazi “Deutsche Physik” movement and the devastating persecution of Jewish scientists.

Here are a couple of podcast versions:

And you’ll find Part I of our discussion, here:

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