An Experiment to Form a Radio Communication Channel in a Marine Environment

General Discussion
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…Maxwellian electromagnetism and how the modern presentation of it neglects the primacy of fields (as opposed to charges and particles), as the primary mechanism for propagation of energy and signals.

That seems a rather odd thesis: Jackson’s Classical Electrodynamics, for instance, puts fields front and center.

Now, if he’s talking about quantum physics, then indeed they often represent classical “fields” as “virtual particles” flying back and forth. But one should have some sympathy there: a single particle in quantum physics is represented by a whole wavefunction of probabilities, and representing fields (when one cannot do that by reverting to the classical versions of fields) is harder still. A particle, which classically is represented by six variables (three for position, three for velocity) becomes in quantum physics an infinity of variables. And a field is classically already an infinity of variables, so “please please can we reduce those to particles so that they’re at least minimally tractable in quantum terms” should be something one can sympathize with.

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If I’m interpreting that right, E, A, and Φ are as usual (electric field and scalar and vector potential), while v is velocity and E_v is the electric field on a particle moving at velocity v. (Or, strictly speaking, the result of the combination of the electric and magnetic fields, ∇ × A being the magnetic field and thus the term containing it representing its contribution.)

In any case, that “crackpot” term is not a small term to add to the equation; it’s not like, say, Einstein’s corrections to Newtonian physics, which are negligible at everyday speeds. It’s large and would manifest itself strongly in all sorts of experiments and real-world applications.

And then on top of that, to get theory to “fit your measurements” you needed to also “tweak” Φ somehow, Φ basically being the voltage (in static situations it’s precisely the voltage), though your description of the tweak is vague enough that I cannot pin it down.

And all this mucking with the laws of physics seemed easier than just debugging your damn experiment and figuring out where you screwed it up.

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That Woodside paper seems like a nice paper, but it’s purely mathematical: at least at first skim I see no suggestion in it that any change needs to be made in physical laws. That’d be Hively’s contribution, and he seems to be overvaluing uniqueness in theory. There’s no reason a theoretical object (like the vector potential) has to be unique; all that matters is that whatever choice you make, that choice doesn’t affect the end results of calculations. Having multiple theories for the same thing, even theories of very different forms, is normal in physics and math, and even helpful since you can choose the theory that’s easiest for any given application.

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Another, perhaps even more startling correspondence with Hively and “Hidden Truth”:

I noticed the reference to Oakridge National Laboratories as in the vicinity of the protagonists.

Hively did his original work on extended electrodynamics at ORNL, from which he then retired to start his company.

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Another correspondence between Hively and “Hidden Truth”:

Hively’s patent was granted April 2016.

Hidden Truth was published May 2016.

The saying, often quoted in “Hidden Truth”, comes to mind:

First time is happenstance.
Second time is coincidence.
Third time is enemy action.

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As you’re probably discovering, Dr Schantz is a learned connoisseur of conspiracy theories and offbeat footnotes in the history of science and technology. You probably won’t be surprised to discover, for example, that Ettore Majorana plays a part in the sequels. Then there’s that nuclear bomb that was lost in 1958 near Jekyll Island, home of other skulduggery earlier in the century.

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True as far as that goes.

I think Woodside was motivated by a burgeoning body of work by various investigators, going back many decades in some cases, who were all coming up with variations on what Hively calls “extended electrodynamics”. These were mostly independent of each other, relatively incomplete and occasionally motivated by observations, however apocryphal and inadequate in terms of experimental rigor they might have been. Woodside found a uniqueness theorem that happened to provide Hively with shoulders to stand on in attempting to bring theory into testable hypotheses. Hively did some additional parameterization but of a very modest nature – like assuming photons have zero rest mass – to come up with his Lagrangian that defines his EED that then decomposes into the above equations.

PS: After further discourse with Hively, I suspect the number of “unknowns” in that Lagrangian numbers only 8, because it is in terms of sources and potentials: The vectors A and J and the scalars phi and rho (charge density).

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This just in from Lee Hively in response to my request that he construct a Rosetta Stone of notations for Extended Electrodynamics along the lines of that for Conventional Electrodynamics in TABLE I of https://arxiv.org/pdf/1010.4947.pdf

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hoo-boy… here we go…

Check out this paper in Nature “Scientific Reports” which I ran across as citing the recent “crackpot” stuff I ran across below:

The co-investigator with the guy who died in the midst of the experiments got back in touch with me and asked me to come up with a mathematical model of an antenna pattern test rig to predict the phase differences (at various dipole angles) between the null hypothesis and the hypothesis. To get something qualitative for this kind of thing I use a test charge with velocity being adjustable in place of the plasma Rx antenna. This, of course, requires treating the test charge as subject to a Lorentz Force.

So after sending him some preliminary Mathematica notebooks, I went searching the literature to crosscheck my work and discovered that a few months ago some guy published a relevant paper in which he avoided the Lorentz Force calculation by, instead, assigning the velocity to the hertzian dipole – holding the test charge stationary.

Abstract—Owing to the principle of relativity, the present state of knowledge explicitly allows Maxwell’s equations to be solved not only in the rest frame of an electromagnetic transmitter but also directly in the rest frame of the receiver without use of the Lorentz transformation and the Lorentz force. Recently, such a calculation was first performed for the Hertzian dipole. The analysis of the resulting formula breaks new scientific ground and indicates that Maxwell’s equations predict that electromagnetic waves in vacuum propagate at the speed of light, notably for each receiver, even when these receivers have relative velocities with respect to each other. Although this paradoxical phenomenon was expected, the finding that Maxwell’s equations nevertheless predict a classical Doppler effect was unexpected and indicates inconsistent or not yet fully understood aspects of canonical Lorentz-Einstein electrodynamics consisting of Maxwell’s equations, Lorentz force and Lorentz transformation.

That paper cites another published a year ago that details the motional Hertzian dipole math, in which the last 2 paragraphs are:

This approximation was analyzed and compared with the known solution (94) for Lorentz-Einstein electrodynamics. This comparison clarified that there is no need for a Lorentz transformation and that the solution for Weber electrodynamics is physically more reasonable and in full agreement with the wave equation that follows from Maxwell’s equations.

The main conclusion of this article is that Weber electrodynamics is also a Maxwellian electrodynamics, as it can be derived from Maxwell’s equations and the corresponding wave equation. The difference to Lorentz-Einstein electrodynamics lies in the fact that the solution of Maxwell’s equations must always be obtained in the rest frame of the receiver in Weber electrodynamics. However, as the article has shown, this seems to be the only generally valid approach anyway.

I say “hoo-boy… here we go…” not just because this gives the impression of there being “new physics”, but because my original conclusion in attempting to model the experimental data was that if that data was to be believed, it pointed to Weber electrodynamics.

That’s why I went researching the history of the relationship between Weber and Maxwell and found that there had been private communications between Maxwell and Peter Guthrie Tait to the effect that were it not for a preemptive critique of Weber electrodynamics by Helmholtz later found to be specious, Maxwell may have attempted to found his work on Weber electrodynamics.

PS: I should confess that I’m a bit rusty on all this and that if I were pressed on my opinion of Weber electrodynamics (and my original model that led me there) I’d not be able to defend it well. We’ll see if I can afford the time and energy to get back up to speed given other demands.

PPS: During my revisitation of this topic in my email archives, I ran across this invaluable “Rosetta Stone” of historic EM notations going back to the first publications through more recent controversies over the physicality of the curl-free magnetic vector potential.

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Tom Phipps’s estate sale items including 2 generations of PhD physicists accumulating a home physics laboratory in Urbana, IL.

Relevance:

Phipps got me in touch with the “crackpot term” which, itself, traces to Hertz.*

Phipps and I got to know each other, unfortunately, just after this estate sale deprived the aforementioned MVP project – also located in Urbana – of his laboratory. I didn’t know of Phipps or this estate sale until after the estate sale. What is particularly “spooky” is that it turned out one of our team who was located in Albuquerque, NM, had asked me to dig up a book by Phipps titled “Heretical Verities” at just about the time of the estate sale but I moved too slowly in acquiring it. If I had moved more quickly, and gotten the book on interlibrary loan as I eventually did, I would have discovered the foreword to that book was written by a colleague of mine via Tom Etter (an attendee of the Dartmouth AI Summer of 1956), Pierre Noyes. Etter and Noyes were the ones that got me interested in the Combinatorial Hierarchy which led to my recent discovery, first documented here at Scanalyst that, just as predicted by the metaphysics of the 4th entry in the Combinatorial Hierarchy, the proton’s curvature and mass, out of all possible massive particles, most closely matches the dimensionless gravitational coupling constant of the entire universe, just as 137, the 3rd entry, has a metaphysics corresponding to the electromagnetic coupling constant. Since the Combinatorial Hierarchy has no free parameters – it is pure mathematics – it is clearly the case that if this isn’t sheer coincidence, Dirac’s large number hypothesis must either be false or bounds must be placed on the variability of these constants, constrained by pure number theoretic considerations.

Phipps had moved out of his family’s long-time home in Urbana due to failing health so I didn’t get to know him very long before this – the last of the home-laboratory physicists with the imprimatur of the prestige academies – ended that tradition, at least until civilization is rebuilt after a collapse.

* While reviewing that paper on Hertzian electrodynamics by Phipps, I ran across this mention of Weber – which I didn’t recall from my previous readings of Phipps’s stuff:

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This bears mentioning in the present context both because it appears that even Nature magazine is starting to entertain “crackpot physics” related to Weber, and because I suffered the slings and arrows of being accused by the aforementioned coinvestigator of having read too much science fiction on account of my resorting to Weber in order to explain his the scope traces he and the principle investigator generated back in 2015 – and he just did it again even after I sent him the Nature paper citing Weber and the reformulation of Einstein’s electrodynamics. I mean I had to take two steps into “kooksville” in order to explain his own scope traces as detected by motional test charges in the plasma: 1) dA/dt rather than ∂A/∂t in E_motional = -∇ϕ-dA/dt (subsuming both E and the Lorentz Force), AND 2) Instantaneous or “rigid” ϕ – the latter of which left me wondering if I had, indeed, joined the ranks of the kooks. But that was the best I could do to fit the data – and I only later discovered that Weber electrodynamics supplied both of these steps.

I mean, was it “science fiction” that led me to try to find the closest preexisting theory that fit the observations or was it simple respect for my own limitations in the face of observations? Keep in mind, the principle investigator had died, I’d barely salvaged the equipment and the co-investigator was calling me a kook while I was attempting to rescue him from homelessness while caring for my dying wife.

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Thanks for finding that, gms. In reading this passage from Noyes’s preface to Phipps’s “Heretical Verities”, it is worth mentioning that, IIRC, Noyes was Kuhn’s college roommate:

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I had not heard that the Lorentz Ether Theory could be interpreted to cover special relativity by simply positing that The Ether wasn’t directly observable.

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Assis’s lecture on Weber Electrodynamics is a reasonable introduction to its history and why some folks are taking it seriously – apparently an increasing number.

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Synchronicity

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