Wonderful note about a most important mathematical physicist.
Unmentioned is his stumble in relativity theory: As Paul Nahin wrote,
Despite the ‘Einsteinian look’ of Heaviside's speed-dependent terms, his analysis was greatly lacking when compared with Einstein's. Heaviside started with moving charged matter and then applied some heavy mathematics to Maxwell's electrodynamics, while Einstein used nothing but the fundamental ideas of space and time, some simple algebra, and the two relativity principles (all physical laws look the same in all inertial frames, and observers in different inertial frames will measure the same value for the speed of light). Einstein's analysis is free of any special assumptions concerning electricity in particular and the nature of matter in general: to put it bluntly, Einstein saw the whole forest, while Heaviside and Thomson were looking through a magnifying glass at the bark on a single tree.
> Einstein saw the whole forest, while Heaviside and Thomson were looking through a magnifying glass at the bark on a single tree.
That's an incorrect characterization.
Heaviside is pre-Michelson-Morley. Einstein is post.
The fact that "Ether doesn't exist. Electromagnetic waves simply transmit without a medium." is a VERY VERY VERY big change in the fundamentals of physics.
That opened the door for the hypothesis that "all physical laws look the same in all inertial frames" because without "Ether" you cannot anoint a preferred inertial frame. The Michelson-Morley experiment was the first test of that hypothesis.
And, to be fair, the kind of fields interpretation that Einstein championed has weaknesses:
1) It's an absolute bear to compute--the Heaviside-Hertz formulations lend themselves to engineering much better pre-computers.
2) It had severe experimental holes--at the time.
For example, the Einstein fields interpretation makes the prediction that an an excited electron in an atom will never decay. That, of course, was nonsense--excited atoms always decay to ground state. Except--now that we can isolate single atoms we absolutely see that single atoms don't decay--only the ensemble interactions cause them to decay.
I just read the 1893 preface to his Electromagnetic theory vol 1 linked in another comment. It mentions the Michelson and other experiments and talks about how to accommodate them
(in now-unfamiliar terms I don't understand).
And, even if Einstein didn't know about it, people who read Einstein's paper did. That meant that Einstein's paper fell onto fertile soil rather than simply being a mathematical curiosity waiting to be discovered at a later time.
Oliver Heaviside is very often underrated and forgotten and he deserves not to be—even his reformulation of Maxwell's equations into the four that we know and commonly use today alone ought to have him receive better history/recognition in the textbooks. This is probably because he was an outsider to the physics and electrical engineering establishment and he wasn't known to make friends easily, and he didn't abide fools well.
It's all very well to praise Heaviside but if one really wants to get a feel for the extent and depth of his work then I refer one to the following works of his that are on the Internet Archive (they're out of copyright so they can be downloaded). Note, as with many works, the Internet Archive has multiple copies some of which are more readable (or better scanned) than others, so the seemingly multiple entries are not duplicates. Two other points to note, this list is not comprehensive and the IA's file-naming conventions are sometimes skewed or confusing (apologies if I've made any typos):
An upvote to those who upvoted this, every bit shows that more people are becoming acquainted with Heaviside's works.
BTW, a factoid just occurred to me that some may not know, which is that the earth's ionosphere—those ionized layers ≈100-200km above ground that reflect radio waves—is called the Heaviside layer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennelly%E2%80%93Heaviside_lay....
I will always upvote Heaviside. This man is responsible for most of the foundation of electrical engineering as it exists today (via and refined by others, especially those at Bell Labs who recognized the importance of his work). Unfortunately, in my experience, most electrical engineers only know his name as a reference to the step function.
As mentioned in the article he wasn't well accepted by academics of the time. A college math professor of mine remarked that the acceptance of naming the step function after him was intentionally demeaning to the rest of his work.
Yeah, right. ;-) But ultimately those who demeaned Heaviside weren't that successful given that most of his electrical nomenclature has actually stood the test of time and is still used today. It's worth quoting Wiki's list (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside):
"Electromagnetic terms
Heaviside coined the following terms of art in electromagnetic theory:
• admittance (reciprocal of impedance) (December 1887);
• elastance (reciprocal of permittance, reciprocal of capacitance) (1886);
• conductance (real part of admittance, reciprocal of resistance) (September 1885);
• electret for the electric analogue of a permanent magnet, or, in other words, any substance that exhibits a quasi-permanent electric polarization (e.g. ferroelectric);
• impedance (July 1886);
• inductance (February 1886);
• permeability (September 1885);
• permittance (now called capacitance) and permittivity (June 1887);
Indeed, and perhaps I should have expanded on the context surrounding that remark. The professor considered Heaviside to be underappreciated and used the story as a lesson on academic and establishment fallibility.
"Coaxial cable was used in the first (1858) and following transatlantic cable installations, but its theory wasn't described until 1880 by English physicist, engineer, and mathematician Oliver Heaviside, who patented the design in that year (British patent No. 1,407)."
Interestingly the 4 "Maxwell" Equations as we know them today in its algebraic form are actually developed by Heaviside. The original 12 Maxwell equations containing ugly complex calculus expressions are far less elegant and unintuitive.
"Heaviside's equations, which are taught in textbooks and universities as Maxwell's equations are not exactly the same as the ones due to Maxwell, and, in fact, the latter are more easily forced into the mold of quantum physics"
This paper goes into more detail - essentially the Heaviside equations are designed to be easy for electrical engineers to use, through an appropriate choice of gauge (Lorenz), which limits their true scope. Maxwell's magnetic scalar equation has also been ignored:
The difference is that some of Maxwell's early formulations focused more on the scalar and vector potentials, while Heaviside's formulation focuses on the electric and magnetic fields. The potentials are more natural for quantum physics, and are arguably physical entities observable in quantum effects (Aharonov–Bohm effect), but in classical electrodynamics both formulations are exactly equivalent. Heaviside's formulation doesn't leave out any interesting physics present in Maxwell's original formulation, though there is interesting physics not predicted by classical electrodynamics.
> essentially the Heaviside equations are designed to be easy for electrical engineers to use, through an appropriate choice of gauge (Lorenz), which limits their true scope
As for your linked paper - it is full of inaccuracies and faux-mysteries that are actually either well explained in mainstream physics or simply manufactured by the author. I'll respond to some of the more blatant problems below.
> Then there is one ofour first elephants in the room. If this simplification of reformulated 12 of 20 equations to give us todays mathematical framework, what happened to the other eight equations?
Here's what happened to them: they have been lost, rejected or forgotten by mainstream physicists.
Just kidding! Nowadays we call them "Ohm's Law," "conservation of charge", and the definition of the electric displacement field. This is not a secret - you can read Maxwell's 1865 paper and compare to the modern version, or it's even on your wikipedia page.
> [ various whining about the displacement current ]
Please refer to any source on electrodynamics. It is widely acknowledged that "displacement current" is not really a current, it's just a name for the contribution of a time-varying electric field to magnetic fields.
> The constant mu0 is a constant that is measured from the forces created from electric currents flowing thru COPPER conductors.These relations have worked fine for electric currents flowing thru COPPER wire conductors. However,when we use this constant for other types of electric currents in different substances we end up with the wrong values and the wrong assumptionson how these materials react to electric currents
The permeability of free space is not dependent on copper conductors.
> Yet,while in the software worldleaving loose ends like uninitialized variables or unconnected interrupt vectors is considered sloppy at best. The physics world seems to be very happy with leaving loose ends,like extra equations and unsolved potentials,around with no real effort to resolve them.
Yeah, gauge freedom is a thing. It's fine.
A lot of this "paper" seems to be freely mixing the original formulations of Maxwell's equations with some "generalization" of Maxwell's equations proposed in this:
(cited on page 39), which adds some random terms the equations to yield a new physical scalar field, which no one has ever seen.
I'd strongly recommend that you find a better source for your study of electrodynamics than this document by some dude trying to sell yet another propellantless vacuum thruster.
Like I said, I'm not an expert (or at least not an EM specialist). I attended a virtual conference by Richard Banduric a few months ago which I was reminded of when I saw this item. His presentation/lecture is here if you're interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPzG2frOzZ8
I've been doing a deeper dive to try to find some corroboration for the "additional" scalar element - there's a lot of obvious junk science around the work of e.g. Tom Bearden (cheniere.org), but I've also found this, which calls it a "temporal field" but seems to be a similar derivation:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/math-ph/0307038.pdf
If you enjoy reading about this sort of stuff, then whatever floats your boat, but to be perfectly clear: these extra terms and additional scalar field were not part of Maxwell's theory. The theory of classical electrodynamics is gauge invariant, and in this theory this "magnetic scalar potential" derived from the divergence of the magnetic vector potential is not physically meaningful.
P.M. Jack is at least clear about this:
> [Maxwell's] work is fundamentally different from that presented here
Some of your less honest (or more confused or delusional) sources claim that this is some lost part of Maxwell's theory, likely to lend credence to their anti-gravity / free energy / faster-than-light / perpetual motion woo (discovered and kept secret by the CIA?).
(in case it appears I'm unreasonably dismissing this with these references to pseudoscience, I'm not - anti-gravity / free energy / faster-than-light / perpetual motion & the CIA are all discussed in the final researchgate link, not added by me for fun).
I read lately that the Heaviside layer (Kennelly-Heaviside properly) of the atmosphere, composed of ionized gases, was used for years to bounce radio transmissions off of, allowing them to "skip" multiple times occasionally and travel thousands of miles. It was seasonal and unpredictable on a short term basis so using it seems to have been about equal parts luck, skill, and art.
Shortwave radio was great in its day. I used to spend many hours a day listening to international shortwave broadcasts, and talking with other amateur radio operators.
One day about 20 years ago I was driving through San Jose and happened to tune in to North Korea radio on the shortwave receiver I had installed in my car, and heard this news gem:
"Scientists are studying the brain of Respected Comrade Kim Jong-Il, because the Respected Comrade is capable of feats of mental power beyond the ability of ordinary human beings."
Even today, shortwave is making a bit of a comeback thanks to High Frequency Trading:
Such an interesting character. I can't recommend enough 'Oliver Heaviside: life, works and times of an electrical genius of the Victorian age' by Paul J. Nahin, it's written in such a way that won't make it hard to you if you don't want to dive too deep in the math, but every chapter does include appendices and notes that do go deep, so you get all the details. A treat for EE history lovers.
Unmentioned is his stumble in relativity theory: As Paul Nahin wrote,
Despite the ‘Einsteinian look’ of Heaviside's speed-dependent terms, his analysis was greatly lacking when compared with Einstein's. Heaviside started with moving charged matter and then applied some heavy mathematics to Maxwell's electrodynamics, while Einstein used nothing but the fundamental ideas of space and time, some simple algebra, and the two relativity principles (all physical laws look the same in all inertial frames, and observers in different inertial frames will measure the same value for the speed of light). Einstein's analysis is free of any special assumptions concerning electricity in particular and the nature of matter in general: to put it bluntly, Einstein saw the whole forest, while Heaviside and Thomson were looking through a magnifying glass at the bark on a single tree.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2017.044...