1.2 A New Understanding

Does reality comprise “atoms and void?” Or is reality a continuous plenum: a field in Faraday’s sense? These questions are as old as physics itself. Contemporary physicists will tell you that reality is made of one thing. For some, quantum fields are fundamental, and particles are merely excitations in that field. For others, the particles themselves are fundamental and fields are a mathematical fiction. The study of the fundamental nature of reality is dubbed “particle physics,” after all. However, those particles the physicists study are simultaneously imbued with miraculous, paradoxical, contradictory, non-local, wave-like properties.

This book presents a new interpretation of electromagnetism which suggests a simple resolution to the timeless question: particles or fields? It’s not particles OR fields. It’s not one thing: particles with wave-like properties, or conversely, waves with particle-like properties. Instead, reality comprises two distinct and separate things: fields AND particles working together to give rise to what we see around us. Electromagnetism works through the agency of fields: non-local phenomena that behave like waves. Those fields guide the flow of energy. In the quantum limit, energy behaves as particles: point-like concentrations of mass and energy.

Figure 1.3 (a): In conventional thinking, light is a single entity called a “photon” that is simultaneously a particle and a wave, (left) [[i]]. (b): In a new approach, electromagnetics is due to the actions of fields (white dashed arrows) guiding energy (black arrows), (right).

Figure 1.3 (a) makes an attempt to offer a coherent picture to illustrate conventional thinking in which a photon is localized in a fuzzy, indeterminate way, yet with a particular wavelength or phase associated with where it is and where it is not.

Figure 1.3 (b) illustrates the new approach. Fields propagate from place-to-place in a wave-like motion first predicted by Faraday in 1832 [[ii]] and mathematically defined by Maxwell in 1865 [[iii]]. Wave A in quadrants III and IV and Wave B in quadrants IV and I approach at right angles to each other, converging toward quadrant II. Each wave guides energy moving in lockstep with its corresponding fields in quadrant III (for Wave A) and in quadrant I (for Wave B). In quadrant IV, the waves overlap and interfere. The waves pass through each other at the speed of light. In so doing, they trade or exchange energy. As a result, the energy in quadrant IV no longer moves in lockstep with either wave. Instead, energy follows a different, independent path under the influence of the two interfering waves. Sometimes energy moves with one wave. Then, the energy slows down and attaches itself to the other wave. Fields and energy: two different things cooperating to make electromagnetism happen. The fundamental idea is quite straightforward, and it is astonishing that the implications of this simple concept have not previously been explored at length.

That’s all there is to it.

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[i] Dugnolle, Thierry, “A gaussian wave packet. The color (white yellow red [in the original]) indicates the phase of the wave function ψ, its intensity indicates |ψ|². This wave function could represent the motion of a quantum particle.” See: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wavelet.gif

[ii] Faraday, Michael, Private Communication to the Secretary of the Royal Society, 1832. See Chapter 3 for details.

[iii] Maxwell, James Clerk, “A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field,” Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond., vol. 155, 1865, pp. 459-512, published 1 January 1865.