1.3 Wait... That's All There Is To It?

Yes, That’s All There Is To It: Fields Guide Energy.

There’s a wealth of detail to be grasped before you can truly understand what “fields guide energy” means, however. “Planets go around the sun,” “matter is made of atoms,” and “diseases may be caused by germs” are basic principles of astronomy, chemistry, and medicine, respectively, but you must understand them at a deeper level to be an astronomer, a chemist, a doctor, or even a well-informed amateur.

In the case of fields guiding energy, you must understand – for instance – that light or electromagnetic waves convey a balance of energy: equal amounts of energy in electric and magnetic forms, moving at the speed of light. The interactions of electromagnetic waves with matter or with each other upset that balance, slowing down some or all of the energy so that it moves slower than the usual speed of light. As a result, waves trade or exchange energy with each other [[i]]. An intuitive grasp of this behavior makes clear a wide range of physical behavior previously regarded as confusing and contradictory.

Such a claim may be difficult to believe because the implications are so provocative. We’ve been thinking the wrong way about reality in general and electromagnetism in particular for over a century. The conventional wisdom in electromagnetism has some obvious yet overlooked flaws. There is another way of looking at electromagnetism, a model entirely consistent with Maxwell’s equations and the experimental evidence, yet with profoundly different interpretations for how reality works. Finally, this new way of looking at electromagnetism makes sense of long-standing quantum paradoxes.

Such revolutions in thought come rarely. The Copernican or heliocentric model of the solar system overthrew the Ptolemaic or geocentric model and made us accept that our world is not the center of all creation. The widely accepted “Big Bang” theory overthrew the steady-state theory of cosmology, making us understand that the universe itself had a specific beginning.

The new and revolutionary model proposed in this book may not seem all that new nor all that revolutionary. Louis de Broglie (1892–1987), David Bohm (1917–1992), and others long advocated for a pilot-wave interpretation of quantum mechanics. Sadly, they largely failed to persuade their colleagues who preferred alternate interpretations.

This book shows that classical electromagnetism can, and must, have a similar interpretation to make sense of fields guiding energy. Quantum mechanics must yield to the demonstrated facts of electromagnetic behavior and correspond with the classical results and interpretation.

Figure 1.4: A mechanical model of the cross-section of a closed magnetic circuit, as depicted by Oliver Lodge (1851–1940) [[ii]].

The notion that electromagnetism may have something new to tell us may provoke skepticism from thinkers accustomed to thinking in terms of particles. From the perspective of contemporary physicists, the claim that electromagnetic fields and energy provide any novel insight to physical reality may appear as archaic as the imaginary gears and cogwheels in the æther of Figure 1.4. Maxwell and his contemporaries like Oliver Lodge (1851–1940) used such models to understand and interpret his theory. From the modern perspective, Maxwell’s theory is Maxwell’s equations, floating in splendid isolation and unencumbered by the conceptual scaffolding employed in their construction.

However, electromagnetism, together with gravity, comprise the physics of everyday experience. The weak and strong nuclear forces only emerge around the fringes to explain esoteric features of atomic and nuclear physics.

To get a sense where electromagnetism fits in modern physical thinking, visit arXiv.org, the Internet clearinghouse where some physicists are allowed to share their work. Physicists divide their field into the thirteen top-level categories of Figure 1.5.

Figure 1.5: The structure of modern physics, according to arXiv.

General relativity – the modern theory of gravity – takes top billing as one of the thirteen. Electromagnetism is nowhere to be seen. There is a general “physics” category, and underneath it, such categories as “classical physics,” “general physics,” and “history and philosophy of physics.” There’s not even a second-level category dedicated to electromagnetism. Where can one share a novel concept in electromagnetism?

In a stunning act of hubris, physicists are so utterly confident Maxwell is the final word in electromagnetism that they have left no cubbyhole within which novel electromagnetic work or interpretations may be presented and contemplated. To be sure, electromagnetism is still relevant to contemporary physics at the fringes, in areas like condensed matter, quantum mechanics, or high energy physics. The electromagnetism of everyday experience, however, is left to the engineers to work out the practical applications of a theory long since thought to be understood in its entirety.

And yet, just as a seemingly played-out mine may yet yield riches to a miner with a keener eye or a better refining technique, so also can the concept of fields guiding energy tell us something profound and previously unappreciated about how electromagnetism and quantum mechanics really work.

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[i] Schantz, Hans G., “On the Superposition and Elastic Recoil of Electromagnetic Waves,” FERMAT, Vol 4 No 2, Jul-Aug, 2014. See also: https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.1800. Yes, I did manage to get one paper accepted at arXiv.org. They gave me such a hassle with my second paper, ultimately rejecting it, that I haven’t been back. And I ended up publishing it, here, instead: Schantz, Hans G., (2018) Energy velocity and reactive fields Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A.3762017045320170453 http://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2017.0453

[ii] Lodge, Oliver, Modern Views of Electricity, London: Macmillan & Co., 1889, p. 191.