Understanding electricity means understanding "The Field"

On the Shoulders of Giants – By Don Davis

Plumbing analogies are often used to describe electrical circuit operation. While useful for conveying a working understanding of the concept, vastly greater insights are gained by looking deeper. Don Davis and Dr. Eugene Patronis give us a glimpse into the true nature of electricity, wire and circuits. pb

From my first view of the rainbow depiction of the electromagnetic spectrum from dc to gamma ray, I have striven to gain a conceptual mental view of various “fields.” In this quest, I have met many who could communicate Maxwell to me, but few who could provide the metaphysical – an understanding of any part of Maxwell’s work. Dr. Eugene Patronis, a total master of Faraday, Heaviside and Maxwell equations is, in my life, the “mother lode.” In that spirit here is a collection of quotes I treasure as starting points for an intellectual conversation with Gene. Gene has the unique ability to make Maxwell visible in a geometrical way, which incidentally was Heyser’s way as well. Gene’s depth goes infinitely beyond my present grasp, but he’s been patient with his favorite “subway” alumnus.

Michael Faraday, 1831, “Perhaps some force is emanating from the wire.”

Cambridge man: “Faraday, let me assure you, at Cambridge our electricity flows through the wire.”

Oliver Heaviside, 1882, from his book, “Electrical Papers,” Vol. 1.“Had we not better give up the idea that energy is transmitted through the wire altogether? That is the plain course. The energy from the battery neither goes through the wire one way nor the other. Nor is it standing still, the transmission takes place entirely through the dielectric. What, then, is the wire? It is the sink into which the energy is poured from the dielectric and there wasted, passing from the electrical system altogether.”

John Ambrose Fleming in 1898 wrote, “It is important that the student should bear in mind that, although we are accustomed to speak of current as flowing in the wire in one direction or the other, this is a mere form of words. What we call the current in the wire is, to a large extent, a process going on in the space or material outside the wire….”

Ernst Guillemin, Communication Networks, Vol. II, 1935 “Heaviside is the only one who considers the nature of the sources well as the boundary effects both for the initial build-up or transient behavior and for the steady-state condition. He is the first also, to consider the leakage through the insulation, in view of which the true significance of the inductance parameter may be appreciated….. His work is a first approximation only as compared with other, more rigorous treatments. For the engineer, however, this first approximation is usually sufficient.”

“The concept of guided waves. Before Maxwell, the physical picture of the propagation of electricity through a long circuit was more or less that which is frequently presented in elementary textbooks, where the hydraulic analogy to an electric circuit is given for purposes of visualization. That is, the seat of the phenomenon was taken to be within the conductor. What occurred outside the conductor could be neither definitely formulated nor described. The electrical energy was thought of as being transmitted through the conductor which, therefore, became of prime importance. In fact, if we accept this point of view altogether, it becomes impossible to conceive of a flow of electrical energy from one point to another without the aid of an intervening conductor of some sort. It has been the writer’s experience that many students are quite wedded to this point of view, so much so, in fact, that to them the propagation of energy without wires (wireless transmission) becomes a thing altogether apart from other forms of transmission involving an intervening conducting medium. From this angle, the transmission by radio and that by means of a line become not only different in concept but entirely different in analytic treatment and physical interpretation.”

“An appreciation of Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetic wave propagation brings the so-called wireless and wired forms of transmission under the same roof, so to speak. They merely appear as special cases of the same fundamental phenomenon. This is due to the fact that Maxwell makes the fields the primary seat of all that takes place. The presence of a conductor merely causes the field to be broken up into various components, some of which are assigned to the conductor itself, others to the surrounding medium, and still others to the surface separating the two media.”

Malcolm Davidson, in 1976 wrote, “TEM wave fronts, Oliver Heaviside, Transmission line theory and Poynting Vectors – what had all this got to do with some paper logic design and a few TTL gates? I quickly found out that it had a tremendous amount to do with it, allowing me to resolve problems and tackle design issues that had hitherto seemed impossible. I decided to devote time to this apparent chasm between theoretical concepts and physical reality. I would feel pretty bad if some plane filled with 300 passengers crashed due to one of these so called ‘glitches’.

Those of you who feel that many of the ideas are not mainstream should find a copy of “Standard Handbook for Electrical Engineers” by Donald G. Fink and H. Wayne Beaty.…there is a section entitled, “Electromagnetic Wave Propagation Phenomena.”

“The usually accepted view that the conductor current produces the magnetic field surrounding it must be displaced by the more appropriate one that the electromagnetic field surrounding the conductor produces, through a small drain on the energy supply, the current in the conductor. Although the value of the latter may be used in computing the transmitted energy, one should clearly recognize that physically this current produces only a loss and in no way has a direct part in the phenomenon of power transmission.”

“There it was, right in front of me in black and white! The current does not flow around a loop setting up a magnetic field as I had, along with countless other engineers, been taught in high school and university. It is the other way round. The electric current is but an artifact of a more fundamental entity.”

Remarks by Carver Mead, the author of Collective Electrodynamics, during an interview at his home, around 2000:

So early on you knew that electrons were real?

“The electrons were real, the voltages were real, the phase of the sine-wave was real, and the current was real. These are the real things. They were just as real as the water going down through the pipes. You listen to the technology, and you know that these things are totally real, and totally intuitive.”

But they’re also waves, right? Then what are they waving in?“

It’s interesting, isn’t it? That has hung people up ever since the time of Clerk Maxwell, and it’s the missing piece of intuition that we need to develop in young people. The electron isn’t the disturbance of something else. It is its own thing. The electron is the thing that’s wiggling, and the wave is the electron. It is its own medium. You don’t need something for it to be in, because if you did it would be buffeted about and all messed up. So the only pure way to have a wave is for it to be its own medium. The electron isn’t something that has a fixed physical shape. Waves propagate outwards, and they can be large or small. That’s what waves do.

So how big is an electron?

“It expands to fit the container it’s in. That may be a positive charge that’s attracting it – a hydrogen atom – or the walls of a conductor. A piece of wire is a container for electrons. They simply fill out the piece of wire. That’s what all waves do. If you try to gather them into a smaller space, the energy level goes up. That’s what these Copenhagen guys call the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. But there’s nothing uncertain about it. It’s just a property of waves. Confine them, and there’s nothing uncertain about it. It’s just a property of waves. Confine them and you have more wavelengths in a given space, and that means a higher frequency and higher energy. But a quantum wave also tends to go to the state of lowest energy, so it will expand as long as you let it. You can make an electron that’s ten feet across, there’s no problem with that. It’s its own medium, right? And it gets to be less and less dense as you let it expand. People regularly do experiments with electrons that are a foot across.

A ten-foot electron! Amazing!

“It could be a mile. The electrons in my superconducting magnet are that long.

A mile-long electron! That alters our picture of the world – most people’s minds think about atoms as tiny solar systems.

“Right, that’s what I was brought up on – this little grain of something. Now it’s true that if you take a proton and put it together with an electron, you get something that we call a hydrogen atom. But what that is, in fact, is a self-consistent solution of the two waves interacting with each other. They want to be close together because one’s positive and the other is negative, and when they get closer that makes the energy lower. But if they get too close they wiggle too much and that makes the energy higher. So there’s a place where they are just right, and that’s what determines the size of the hydrogen atom. And that optimum is a self-consistent solution of the Schrodinger equation.”

From “The Field” by Lynne McTaggart, 2006

“Dennis Gabor, Nobel Prize in the 1940s, for his discovery of holography, found that any optical image could be converted into the mathematical equivalent of interference patterns, the information that results when waves superimpose on each other. In this technique, you also transfer something that exists in time and space into the spectral domain. The neat trick of Gabor’s equations is that you can also use them in reverse, to take these components representing the interactions of waves – their frequency, amplitude and phase – and use them to reconstruct any image.”

“The other strange property of holography is that each tiny portion of the encoded information contains the whole of the image, so that if you chopped up your photographic plate into tiny pieces, and shone a laser beam on any one of them, you would get the full original image of the object. (emphasis mine – dbd)

“This lead to Karl Pribram’s insight as to the nature of vision. Fritz-Albert Popp further conjectured that consciousness is a global phenomenon that occurred everywhere in the body and not simply in our brains. Consciousness at its most basic is coherent light.”

“When we look at something, we don’t see the image of it in the back of our heads or on the back of our retinas, but in three dimensions and out in the world. It must be that we are creating and projecting a virtual image of the object out in space, in the same place as the actual object, so that the object and our perception of the object coincide. This would mean that the art of seeing is one of transforming. In a sense, in the act of observation, we are transferring the timeless, spaceless world of interference patterns into the concrete and discrete world of space and time – the world of the very apple you see in front of you.

” From the Wall Street Journal, November 2008

“IBM said it signed a contract with closely held International Broadband Electric Communications, Inc., Huntsville, AL, to manage the installation of broadband systems at 13 cooperatives in seven states. The initial contract is for $9.6 million, but an IBM official said the company anticipates getting more business from some of the nation’s 900 other rural electricity cooperatives. IBM said it is also working with electric utilities overseas.”

“The system works by using standard power lines to carry a radio-frequency signal in the magnetic field that surrounds the wires. The signal is continuously amplified by low-priced repeater boxes clamped to the lines. When an electricity customer signs up for broadband services, the supplier mails out a special modem that is plugged into the wall outlet where the computer is plugged in. Pricing starts at $29.95 a month, International Broadband says.”

Conclusion

Richard Heyser gave an AES lecture on Gabor which Carolyn & I were fortunate to attend in which he elaborated these same points and explained that his own work in audio had sprung from Gabor’s “Communication Theory” written during WWII.

As I pointed out in my article on Audio History for Glen Ballou’s “Handbook for Sound Engineers,” we await the holographic sound field in some future Nirvana. dbd