"Veritasium" (YT) - "The Big Misconception About Electricity" ?

[aetherist]

Photaenos propagate outwards throo the aether at perhaps 5c in the near field (approx 2 m) & perhaps c in the far field (wolfgang g gasser).
https://www.electronicspoint.com/forums/threads/experimental-evidence-for-v-c-in-case-of-coulomb-interaction.168813/

We were taught 3c 'nearnuff', decades ago, at university. It was an interesting observation on near vs far field propagation, and how simplistic thoughts of things propagating through space can lead one astray.

There is some kind of standard theory re radio waves being faster than c in the near field, but i don’t understand it.
The near field might be less than one wave length, dunno.
But Gasser measured at over 4m. And he used a spark or pulse i think, which can't really have a wavelength.
Gasser's experiment looks ok. But i don’t have a clue what it is that gave his super luminal speed.
Why would photaenos propagate faster than c early on & slow down later on.
It should be the other way around, if my theory is correct that photaeno congestion slows photaenos, & if there is less congestion later when the photaenos have radiated further out & have spread further apart from each other.

Howardlong's X said that em radiation propagates at exactly c tween his wires which are 24 mm apart, hence that contradicts Gasser.
Gasser must be wrong. But his X looks ok to me.
It would be good if someone repeated Gasser's X.

[aetherist]

[...]I would like to add a comment re my Excel confirmation of Einstein's bending of light passing the Sun.
My Excel is the only (as far as i know) proper confirmation of Einstein's bending in history.
It is based on Einstein's postulates.
The equations derived from Einstein's postulates are not a first rate confirmation, in that they rely on maths, ie they introduce other postulates (of a mathematical kind).
The equations are a second rate confirmation.
If u have not got the time to carry out thousands of calculations, following the light, inch by inch, & then add, then u will need to use the usual (second rate) short cut of deriving an equation.
My Excel is a first rate confirmation. Just saying (hero).

You are mixing and matching concepts from your theory in there with the previous thought experiment, so it doesn't disprove anything there, it just says that the two are not compatible.

I'm curious though as to what difference an iterative integration should have when compared with an analytical one if the expressions exist in excel, and the iteration is done in excel then I don't see why an analytical solution couldn't produce the exact result, i.e. minimum rounding error.

Would you consider sharing the spreadsheet? I'm intrigued if nothing else, doesn't matter if it's undocumented or messy, I can guarantee I've worked with far worse and deliberately obfuscated spreadsheets.

If u message me your email i will send the excel. It is 25Meg so i might have to send in 2 parts.

I was being funny re the first rate versus second rate confirmation stuff. But there is a bit of truth to it, that applying a pure postulate to make a simple equation & applying the simple equation for each km or each second of the traject & summing to get the total bending is a way of checking that the calculus approach has not made an error. For example Prof Poor used calculus & accidentally lost a term in his equation & claimed that the 1.75 arcsec was wrong. And yes calculus is of course more accurate than excel (the accuracy of excel depends on how many lines u use).

[SiliconWizard]

So have you proven the existence of aether with some Excel sheets?

[aetherist]

So have you proven the existence of aether with some Excel sheets?

Every proper aether experiment has confirmed that we have an aetherwind on Earth, especially Demjanov in 1968-72.

I have used excel to help me to crunch lots of experimental numbers from MMXs etc over the years to help make sense of that stuff (which includes length contraction etc).

But my excel that we are talking about for the bending of light passing the Sun has nothing to do with aether or aetherwind, it simply checks Einstein's GTR bending of light. The excel uses Einstein's postulates for bending of time & bending of space, to see if they are internally self consistent (each is supposed to give 0.87 arcsec, totalling 1.75 arcsec)(which they do).

The postulates do indeed give good numbers (confirmed by Hipparcos satellite), & might be good models, but whether the postulates are good science is of course a different question. And i say that there is no such thing as spacetime, hence the science is wrong or partly wrong. The full answer for bending near the Sun has to include the aetherwind.

[adx]

...
The postulates do indeed give good numbers (confirmed by Hipparcos satellite), & might be good models, but whether the postulates are good science is of course a different question. And i say that there is no such thing as spacetime, hence the science is wrong or partly wrong. The full answer for bending near the Sun has to include the aetherwind.

I accept that as a logically consistent 'postulate' in itself. But you have summarised what I thought you were saying a few posts back, where you say half the bending is not consistent with aetherwind, therefore - well you've described it as quoted above. You are using an assertion that the aetherwind exists as a kind of evidence to support that same assertion.

It's not wrong (because it's technically meaningless beyond being an unproven postulate), but is an odd way of stating something you think, without clarifying what you mean by that circular argument.

[aetherist]

...The postulates do indeed give good numbers (confirmed by Hipparcos satellite), & might be good models, but whether the postulates are good science is of course a different question. And i say that there is no such thing as spacetime, hence the science is wrong or partly wrong. The full answer for bending near the Sun has to include the aetherwind.

I accept that as a logically consistent 'postulate' in itself. But you have summarised what I thought you were saying a few posts back, where you say half the bending is not consistent with aetherwind, therefore - well you've described it as quoted above. You are using an assertion that the aetherwind exists as a kind of evidence to support that same assertion.

It's not wrong (because it's technically meaningless beyond being an unproven postulate), but is an odd way of stating something you think, without clarifying what you mean by that circular argument.

The aetherwind has been proven by many kinds of experiments. And the aetherwind inflow to the Sun gives 0.87 arcsec, based on a postulate that the aetherwind moves as per the escape velocity, & on a postulate that photons propagate at c in the aether (which means that photons drift with the aether)(like a plane in the wind)(which in effect means that aether inflow into the Sun gives the same bending as gotten by a falling particle)(if the particle started with the speed of light).

The trouble then is that the slowing of light near mass they say gives the full value of 1.75 arcsec. It would be lovely if it gave only 0.87 arcsec (ie if the slowing was a half)(ie if it was based on a half of the escape velocity), which i could then add to the aether's 0.87 arcsec.

One possibility is that the bending due to aether inflow is double, if the inflow speed is double the escape velocity, giving the full 1.75 arcsec on its own. This would require that the slowing of light near mass gave 0.00 arcsec of bending.

I think that slowing of light near mass is true, & i think that it must slow the nearside of a photon moreso than the far side, in which case it gives bending.

I think that the aether inflow carries the photon in a curved traject, & also that the front of the photon accumulates more curve than the rear, ie the photon has a bend in it (just like the bend in the photon due to Einstein's slowing)(ie in both cases the arrow doesn't remain parallel to its initial angle).

I want to use aether, & i want to use slowing, but that adds 0.87 arcsec to the 1.75 arcsec, or it even doubles the 1.75 arcsec. Something has to give. Still thinking.

[SiliconWizard]

So have you proven the existence of aether with some Excel sheets?

Every proper aether experiment has confirmed that we have an aetherwind on Earth, especially Demjanov in 1968-72.

Are you sure about that?

[aetherist]

So have you proven the existence of aether with some Excel sheets?

Every proper aether experiment has confirmed that we have an aetherwind on Earth, especially Demjanov in 1968-72.

Are you sure about that?

Yes. Even the modern vacuum mode Xs often pick up a weak signal, even tho the signal is supposed to be zero for vacuum mode.

[adx]

I see what you mean. You are saying aetherwind experiments have conclusively proven not only its existence, but have quantified its behaviour to the point you can draw an inarguable conclusion on how the light must behave in that circumstance (passing by the sun). Any other result would overturn an accepted physical law that has been so well tested that it is unrealistic to argue against. Therefore the weaker theory (general relativity) must be somehow wrong, and any support it gets from experimental results can only reasonably be seen as happy accidents (for it).

Except then you say (paraphrasing based on earlier posts) that vacuum experiments only show up effects of aetherwind that are perhaps 1000th of expectation, which supports aetherwind, but does not allow it to be detected anywhere near as easily as was once thought possible in a vacuum.

So what surrounds the sun. Glass?

[aetherist]

I see what you mean. You are saying aetherwind experiments have conclusively proven not only its existence, but have quantified its behaviour to the point you can draw an inarguable conclusion on how the light must behave in that circumstance (passing by the sun). Any other result would overturn an accepted physical law that has been so well tested that it is unrealistic to argue against. Therefore the weaker theory (general relativity) must be somehow wrong, and any support it gets from experimental results can only reasonably be seen as happy accidents (for it).

Except then you say (paraphrasing based on earlier posts) that vacuum experiments only show up effects of aetherwind that are perhaps 1000th of expectation, which supports aetherwind, but does not allow it to be detected anywhere near as easily as was once thought possible in a vacuum.

So what surrounds the sun. Glass?

The oldendays MMX aetherists did indeed think that the best MMXs would be in vacuum. They did their MMXs in air whilst acknowledging that air was a third rate MMX. Some did their MMXs in helium, reckoning that that was second rate, but better than air. It was not until 1968 that the correct calibration was derived for MMXs, by Demjanov, & this showed that the fringeshift in vacuum was zero. However the correct calibration remained a secret until it was again derived in about 2001 by Reg Cahill. Demjanov wrote some English papers starting in about 2005. Then in 2017 i came along & explained that MMXs in vacuum could possibly detect a weak  3rd order signal (or 4th order)(which starts to appear at about the 12th decimal), compared to the standard 2nd order signal for the standard MMX. And of course the amazing brilliant Demjanov MMX had (what i think he called a giant 1st order signal)(1000 times better than the usual 2nd order signals).

In 2007 Reg Cahill confirmed that the aether inflow into Earth was indeed equal to the escape velocity, ie 11.2 km/s.
The aether inflow to the Sun at Earth's orbit is 42 km/s. The inflow into the Sun at the Sun is 618 km/s. And of course we have the Earth's orbital component of the aetherwind of plus or minus 30 km/s.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/0906.5404.pdf
Combining NASA/JPL One-Way Optical-Fiber Light-Speed Data with Spacecraft Earth-Flyby Doppler-Shift Data to Characterise 3-Space Flow Reginald T. Cahill

One of the problems re measuring the bending of light near the Sun is that u have to deduct the bending due to refraction in the Sun's atmosphere, ie in the glass surrounding the Sun. One way of estimating this bending is that it is affected by frequency (ie as in glass). And they assume that the bending due to the nearness of mass is not affected by frequency. So, as u can see, there is a circular argument in there somewhere.

[adx]

Ok I think I accept Feynman's answer, that we can keep asking "why" ad nauseam after hearing "they do". But his appeal is not to something deep and mysterious, instead to something so shallow and readily apparent that it gets taken for granted.

I don't think that's quite what he is saying. He is saying that the underlying phenomena is so deep and mysterious that to truly understand it requires appealing to logic and analysis techniques that fall very far outside our ordinary, everyday intuition.

I thought something along similar lines at first, penning up that Feynman's reply basically boils down to "I don't know, but I know more than you and until you know as much as me you won't know as much as me." - which is 'feyn', of course. But it didn't fit with my next thought, saying the deeper phenomenon that is being questioned is actually the simplest, so I had to change.

I think the interviewer asked the 'wrong' question; starting with the nature of a fundamental force is at the wrong end to ever be satisfied by a sequence of whys. It's not far off asking "I've got an electron in each hand, I bring them together and they repel - why?". I guess that's why Feynman initially looks a bit perturbed, then does an admirable job at lashing an answer together on the spot.

In which case it is as much (I think more) about saying he doesn't know, than saying it is hard to understand or unintuitive.

For all its mystery, gravity is readily apparent and gets taken for granted, I imagine it would have got a similar response if only for completeness. I think it's just that most people in this world will leave unsatisfied after having just learnt the ultimate truth (or something near it) of our physical world, if that truth is "don't know, it just does". So it needs dressing up (or down), to satisfy the human psyche. Gravity maybe less so, because someone is less likely to ask.

But yes, there's no way he's going to be able to explain the "how" component of the question to an untrained audience in a few minutes - how it all interrelates and behaves to the limits of his understanding.

"Magnets are magnetic because they're made up of lots of little magnets." 

That might do!

... until one really dives into the experiments and mathematics that predict the phenomena (and having to ignore all the devices we use whose operation was engineered from the physics).  ...

Generally agree, except the bit I put in italics. I have seen that argument pop up a few of times in the thread - that in essence electrical engineering and especially its advanced results (like iPhones) exist because of physics and academia. AFAIK the physics has usually lagged behind the industrial R&D, except in the early days when there was no commercial application, and a few notable examples (like radio, bad exapmle the iPhone then). Providing enormous support - but playing catch-up to empirical discoveries or very incomplete theories.

My point there is if humanity were somehow limited in its ability to produce high-level physicists and mathematicians (which isn't too much of a stretch if one considers how unlikely that seems in the first place), then we'd still have self-aligning gate CMOS, it just wouldn't be 2nm. There is really little standing in the way of that Apple M1 Ultra MCM, given enough 'tinkering' - it's practically how the semiconductor industry advances anyway. Radio would have been discovered by now. I can get by without Maxwell's equations, and although I'd make a pretty poor RF designer, I still know what I'm doing enough to make things work well enough.

You can make a picture that explains one aspect of the phenomena but the power of Maxwell's Eqs is that it is predictive of ALL (in the classical limit) electromagnetic phenomena.

I can't work out whether I agree or disagree. Which doesn't bode well for my point, which was something Maxwell-sounding but simpler to understand.

If the speed of sound were fixed or you could have Cherenkov radiation in a vacuum, I'd tend to agree.

[HuronKing]

Hey adx,

I think we almost have a consensus viewpoint but I'd like to add some specific comments. 

... until one really dives into the experiments and mathematics that predict the phenomena (and having to ignore all the devices we use whose operation was engineered from the physics).  ...

Generally agree, except the bit I put in italics. I have seen that argument pop up a few of times in the thread - that in essence electrical engineering and especially its advanced results (like iPhones) exist because of physics and academia. AFAIK the physics has usually lagged behind the industrial R&D, except in the early days when there was no commercial application, and a few notable examples (like radio, bad exapmle the iPhone then). Providing enormous support - but playing catch-up to empirical discoveries or very incomplete theories.

There is a degree of 'leap-frogging' between experimentalists (sometimes this includes the engineers) and theoreticians. For example, we knew about the photoelectric effect before Einstein's paper on it. And some physicists (namely Planck) were already toying around with the idea of discrete quanta. But I'd make a strong argument that this singular statement by Einstein changed the world,

Energy, during the propagation of a ray of light, is not continuously distributed over steadily increasing spaces, but it consists of a finite number of energy quanta localised at points in space, moving without dividing and capable of being absorbed or generated only as entities.

Of course it wasn't immediately accepted - new experiments were needed to verify this interpretation. But, it predicted the effects of Compton Scattering. And this explanation of the photoelectric effect not only underpinned quantum mechanics (the basis for transistors) but also gave basis for the engineering of image sensors, phototelegraphy, etc etc.

Your example of the iPhone is not an example of an advancement in physics. No new laws or phenomena were discovered or predicted by its creation. Quite the contrary - the iPhone is a culmination of the application of many diverse phenomena well-established and predicted by physics.
Now, I will contrast this with the invention of fiber optic cables and the Nobel Prize that came with it because making fiber optics work involved the discovery of new physics of materials (the realization that signal attenuation was caused by material impurities and not by fundamental light scattering).

In another thread on this forum I talked about another example of engineering leapfrogging with physics. Here is a portion of that comment reproduced here for your convenience:

In addition to once having Tesla on his payroll, Edison also hired physicist-engineers:
Charles Steinmetz (discoverer of magnetic hysteresis and inventor of complex phasor analysis and most 'practical' tools we take for granted, seriously, this guy was incredible)
Francis Upton (who has been called the Maxwell to Edison's Faraday, using physics to quantify Edison's experimental observations)
Arthur Kennelly (also a contributor to complex numbers in transient analysis)
John Ambrose Fleming (engineer who was personally instructed by Maxwell and made the equipment for the first transatlantic radio broadcast)

Heaviside also consulted on Edison's work in his publications in The Electrician.

The list goes on.

And I'm really, really doing a terrible injustice to the accomplishments of these accomplished mathematicians and physicists by summarizing them so thusly. My point is that Tesla is correct. Edison with his 'practical' mind didn't know jackshit about how any of the inventions produced in his lab actually worked. He had an army of incredible physicists to explain how any of it worked and they were all masters of Maxwell's theory. And they all utterly changed our world.

And pointing this out doesn't take anything away from Edison or even Faraday who were both eminently accomplished experimentalists/engineers. But the advancement of human civilization comes from observing a phenomena, conceiving an explanation for it, and then seeing how far that explanation will take you - can you use it to predict new phenomena? And if that explanation fails to account for the new phenomena, get a better explanation! Build a new thing using that explanation... Rinse and repeat until you have an iPhone. 

My point there is if humanity were somehow limited in its ability to produce high-level physicists and mathematicians (which isn't too much of a stretch if one considers how unlikely that seems in the first place), then we'd still have self-aligning gate CMOS, it just wouldn't be 2nm. There is really little standing in the way of that Apple M1 Ultra MCM, given enough 'tinkering' - it's practically how the semiconductor industry advances anyway. Radio would have been discovered by now. I can get by without Maxwell's equations, and although I'd make a pretty poor RF designer, I still know what I'm doing enough to make things work well enough.

If Maxwell had been asked to improve communications... he would've just tried to build a better telegraph. No one in the 1860s could've conceived of a possibility to send wireless communications until Maxwell definitively proved the relationship between electric and magnetic phenomena. And the mathematics predicted a specific behavior - that radio waves could be emitted and received. How joyous for humanity that the prediction was correct.

And extending the theory, Heaviside discovered that Poynting Vector and invented coaxial cables.

Does EVERYONE need to use the intricacies of that theory all the time? No, of course not - we have developed special cases and formulas to make the physics applicable to a wide variety of situations without having to constantly rederive everything. But, we shouldn't then be upset when we're made aware of when our special tools and simplifications are not what's "really" going on (as Veritasium tried to do about energy propagation in classical theory, YMMV on if he did a good job).

And even Maxwell's gorgeous theory has its classical limits - it doesn't accurately predict the photoelectric effect (Planck's Constant appears nowhere in Maxwell's Eqs). 

[SiliconWizard]

So have you proven the existence of aether with some Excel sheets?

Every proper aether experiment has confirmed that we have an aetherwind on Earth, especially Demjanov in 1968-72.

Are you sure about that?

Yes. Even the modern vacuum mode Xs often pick up a weak signal, even tho the signal is supposed to be zero for vacuum mode.

I wonder if you're "affiliated" with this website in any way (or if you at least "endorse" its content): https://energywavetheory.com

[TimFox]

Entering the 20th Century, there were several unexplained but demonstrated phenomena, including:
1.  The "ultraviolet catastrophe" (q.v.) for black-body radiation, which motivated Planck's introduction of his famous constant.
2.  The photoelectric effect.  As mentioned above, not explained by Maxwell, but discussed by Einstein applying Planck's result.
3.  The precession of Mercury's orbit.  Once again, Einstein applied himself to this question.
4.  The Michelson-Morley experiment, which some here have scoffed at.
5.  Atomic structure.  Classical statistical mechanics treated molecules as solid objects, but spectroscopy showed that there was structure.  Bohr's early atomic model, using early quantum physics, was consistent with observed spectroscopy.
6.  Radioactivity and x rays.
          etc.
Note that the Maxwell equations survived this tumult, since they turned out to be consistent with Special Relativity.
A good summary of the fin de siècle history:  https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1207/1207.2016.pdf .
However, physics has progressed in the last 120 years, as later scientists built upon the early work, and some results were modified (especially in the field of quantum mechanics, which replaced the earlier quantum theories).  The validity of scientific theory is not based on its history, but experimental verification.

[aetherist]

So have you proven the existence of aether with some Excel sheets?

Every proper aether experiment has confirmed that we have an aetherwind on Earth, especially Demjanov in 1968-72.

Are you sure about that?

Yes. Even the modern vacuum mode Xs often pick up a weak signal, even tho the signal is supposed to be zero for vacuum mode.

I wonder if you're "affiliated" with this website in any way (or if you at least "endorse" its content): https://energywavetheory.com

Energy Wave Theory (Equations), mainly by Yee. He has about 16 papers etc that explain. I haven’t seen any of that before. A quick comment.

(1) Yee reckons that the neutrino might be the basic building block. I have said that the basic building block is the photon or the neutrino (a neutrino being a pair of photons sharing the same axis). So that is interesting. I wonder how he thort of that. I wonder whether he reckons that dark matter is made of confined neutrinos. Yee reckons that the neutrino is the smallest particle.

(2) Yee duznt seem to mention aether. But he seems to invoke something pulsating in say 4 ways, giving energy waves, & the standing waves give us particles or something. Which is really just one of the many kinds of aether that one hears about. Everything is i reckon an excitation of the aether, plus (3) an annihilation of the aether, & (4) aether flows in.
Yee mentions aether granules.

(5) Duz Yee reckon that an electron is a confined photon.
Yee reckons that photons are emitted by vibrating particles, eg vibrating electrons. Particles are standing waves created by inwards & outwards waves reflecting off a reflexion point (so reflexion points make particles).

(6) What is gravity. I reckon that gravity is due to the acceleration of aether flowing into matter (see (3)&(4)).
Yee says that gravity is due to particle spin which affects the longitudinal characteristic of inwards & outwards waves thusly creating an imbalance & a movement, ie a force.

(7) What is electricity. Yee duznt mention anything like my electons.

(8 )(9) Yee might have a clever theory re em radiation. Yee says lots here. But he reckons that radio waves are photons. No.

(1) to (7) are the things that i need to look for to see if they accord with my ideas.

(10) Yee seems to give a lot of thort to the relationship tween photons & electron orbitals. Which is at the top of my list of things that keep me awake at night. I reckon that photons orbit as photons, not as electrons.

[aetherist]

Entering the 20th Century, there were several unexplained but demonstrated phenomena, including:
1.  The "ultraviolet catastrophe" (q.v.) for black-body radiation, which motivated Planck's introduction of his famous constant.
2.  The photoelectric effect.  As mentioned above, not explained by Maxwell, but discussed by Einstein applying Planck's result.
3.  The precession of Mercury's orbit.  Once again, Einstein applied himself to this question.
4.  The Michelson-Morley experiment, which some here have scoffed at.
5.  Atomic structure.  Classical statistical mechanics treated molecules as solid objects, but spectroscopy showed that there was structure.  Bohr's early atomic model, using early quantum physics, was consistent with observed spectroscopy.
6.  Radioactivity and x rays.
          etc.
Note that the Maxwell equations survived this tumult, since they turned out to be consistent with Special Relativity.
A good summary of the fin de siècle history:  https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1207/1207.2016.pdf .
However, physics has progressed in the last 120 years, as later scientists built upon the early work, and some results were modified (especially in the field of quantum mechanics, which replaced the earlier quantum theories).  The validity of scientific theory is not based on its history, but experimental verification.

STR is krapp -- & GTR is mostly krapp.
We are presently in the Einsteinian Dark Age of science -- but the times they are a-changin'.
The aether will return -- it never left.
Einstein's field equations can't even give Mercury a stable orbit, as shown by modern computer analysis.

Panurge (from Greek: πανοῦργος / panoûrgos meaning "knave, rogue") is one of the principal characters in Gargantua and Pantagruel, a series of five novels by François Rabelais. Especially important in the third and fourth books, he is an exceedingly crafty knave, libertine, and coward.[1]

In Chapter 9 of the first book, he shows that he can speak many languages (German, Italian, Scottish, Dutch, Spanish, Danish, Hebrew, Greek, Latin and French), including some of the first examples of a constructed language.

In French, reference to Panurge occurs in the phrase mouton de Panurge [fr], which describes an individual who will blindly follow others regardless of the consequences. This, after a story in which Panurge buys a sheep from the merchant Dindenault and then, as a revenge for being overcharged, throws the sheep into the sea. The rest of the sheep in the herd follow the first over the side of the boat, in spite of the best efforts of the shepherd.

Suddenly, I do not know how, it happened, I did not have time to think, Panurge, without another word, threw his sheep, crying and bleating, into the sea. All the other sheep, crying and bleating in the same intonation, started to throw themselves in the sea after it, all in a line. The herd was such that once one jumped, so jumped its companions. It was not possible to stop them, as you know, with sheep, it's natural to always follow the first one, wherever it may go.

— Francois Rabelais, Quart Livre, chapter VIII

[TimFox]

So you say.
My reply dealt only with the history that led up to this work, but you insist that everything that you find icky is (mis-spelled) crap.

[aetherist]

So you say.
My reply dealt only with the history that led up to this work, but you insist that everything that you find icky is (mis-spelled) crap.

Yes i see what u mean. Sorry.

[Alex Eisenhut]

I think the main question is: how can I use your theory to reduce my electric (or is that electic) bill?

[bsfeechannel]

Generally agree, except the bit I put in italics. I have seen that argument pop up a few of times in the thread - that in essence electrical engineering and especially its advanced results (like iPhones) exist because of physics and academia. AFAIK the physics has usually lagged behind the industrial R&D, except in the early days when there was no commercial application, and a few notable examples (like radio, bad exapmle the iPhone then). Providing enormous support - but playing catch-up to empirical discoveries or very incomplete theories.

My point there is if humanity were somehow limited in its ability to produce high-level physicists and mathematicians (which isn't too much of a stretch if one considers how unlikely that seems in the first place), then we'd still have self-aligning gate CMOS, it just wouldn't be 2nm. There is really little standing in the way of that Apple M1 Ultra MCM, given enough 'tinkering' - it's practically how the semiconductor industry advances anyway. Radio would have been discovered by now. I can get by without Maxwell's equations, and although I'd make a pretty poor RF designer, I still know what I'm doing enough to make things work well enough.

You gotta be kidding me. Do you think that the engineers who are proud of not knowing their butts from a hole in the ground when it comes to Maxwell's equations and other basic concepts in classical physics would be capable of figuring out how nuclear magnetic resonance works and developing MRI scanning techniques?

Engineers had four decades to come up with the transistor after the invention of the triode, yet it was up to three physicists to understand how to control the current through a semiconductor slab by an external electric field.

How about the blue LED? It all started with physicists. And it was physicists who made it possible to produce high power blue LEDs.

All of those recent breakthroughs changed our lives forever. The idea that physics stopped being relevant in the early 20th century is a misconception, as very well pointed out by Huronking.

By the way, the physicists mentioned above were all recipients of a Nobel Prize.

[adx]

While I am considering a reply to Huronking's post, I have to strongly disagree with this, on principle (of being right).

To the MRI thing - hell yes. Even I could work it out. You place stuff in a magnetic field - almost any field will do. You apply pulses - and notice there is an RF signal back from the stuff that is not a simple reflection. You notice that different materials produce different but very stable frequencies, which vary with DC field strength. You wonder if a gradient might allow a physical map of stuff's density to be ascertained simply from that radio reception. So you make an artifact and try it - MRI is born (except it stands for magnet radio imaging, because the concept of nuclear magnetic resonances are unknown). (I'm not talking about everything in tech that might have lead up to that discovery to make it seem so trivial, but the principle behind the discovery itself, and the fact that it would progress very rapidly without the known theoretical basis.)

The story behind the transistor is much more empirical and stumbley than you make out, and seems to owe a great debt to Julius Edgar Lilienfeld's patent on the FET in 1925, when physical theories were less advanced. The transistor was pretty much a poster child for advanced hacking and the physics following experiment.

Blue LED? You walked right into that one ... "discovered in 1907 by the English experimenter H. J. Round" (Wikipedia). I was so intrigued when I discovered that a few years back, that I tried it, with some 120 grit SiC sandpaper. It worked. Not very well, and a kind of pale greeny-blue, but definitely a blue LED.

I'm certainly not denying the great advances in physics or saying that all advances in engineering are disconnected from physics, just that there seems to be a current fashionable POV belief-in-science school of thought that misrepresents history and reality. Again I'm not saying I disagree completely, just with the false facts.

[TimFox]

"Nuclear Magnetic Resonance" (NMR) was demonstrated by the physicists Felix Bloch and Edward Purcell, independently, in 1946.
At the fundamental level, it is a quantum effect, where the magnetic moment of the proton or other nucleus has only a finite number of states (2 for spin 1/2) and therefore has a resonant frequency for the energy transition between the two states in a constant external magnetic field.  It is used in chemistry as a spectroscopic technique, showing the variations in local magnetic field due to the molecular structure.  It is also useful for precise measurements of magnetic fields, such as making the main magnetic field for MRI as uniform as practicable.
"Magnetic Resonance Imaging" (MRI) is an application of NMR, and was developed for medical imaging by Paul Lauterbur (PhD in chemistry) in 1971, where he applied controlled gradients in the external magnetic field in order to encode position as a shift in the resonant frequency.  In German, it is "Kernspintomografie", literally nuclear spin tomography.  Other scientists contributed to the further development, along with tons of money and engineering improvements from the major companies in medical imaging.
Greatly oversimplified, if you apply a pulsed radio-frequency magnetic field (not a wave) to the sample full of appropriate nuclei (e.g., water), you can flip the nuclear spins if the frequency and field agree, and when the nuclei relax due to thermal interactions with the material and go back to the lower energy state, it induces an AC voltage in the receiving coil.  Fourier analyzing the received voltage is used either for spectroscopy or to decode the nuclear density as a function of position (according to the field gradient).  For hydrogen in nuclei (protons), a magnetic field of 1.5 Tesla (15 kgauss) corresponds to about 64 MHz.

[bsfeechannel]

While I am considering a reply to Huronking's post, I have to strongly disagree with this, on principle (of being right).

To the MRI thing - hell yes. Even I could work it out. You place stuff in a magnetic field - almost any field will do. You apply pulses - and notice there is an RF signal back from the stuff that is not a simple reflection. You notice that different materials produce different but very stable frequencies, which vary with DC field strength. You wonder if a gradient might allow a physical map of stuff's density to be ascertained simply from that radio reception. So you make an artifact and try it - MRI is born (except it stands for magnet radio imaging, because the concept of nuclear magnetic resonances are unknown). (I'm not talking about everything in tech that might have lead up to that discovery to make it seem so trivial, but the principle behind the discovery itself, and the fact that it would progress very rapidly without the known theoretical basis.)

Oh, yeah! After the fact, anyone can say it would be easy to figure it out, no doubt. But it took a physicist to come up with that idea because he knew what to look for.

"Nuclear magnetic resonance was first described and measured in molecular beams by Isidor Rabi in 1938, by extending the Stern–Gerlach experiment, and in 1944, Rabi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for this work."

"In collaboration with Gregory Breit, he developed the Breit–Rabi equation and predicted that the Stern–Gerlach experiment could be modified to confirm the properties of the atomic nucleus. His techniques for using nuclear magnetic resonance to discern the magnetic moment and nuclear spin of atoms earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944."
 

The story behind the transistor is much more empirical and stumbley than you make out, and seems to owe a great debt to Julius Edgar Lilienfeld's patent on the FET in 1925, when physical theories were less advanced. The transistor was pretty much a poster child for advanced hacking and the physics following experiment.

Three misconceptions. The first one, that physics is theory, engineering is practice. Second, that the road to scientific breakthroughs is not bumpy. The third is that the transistor effect was discovered by accident. No, they knew exactly what they were looking for. Only that their initial prediction didn't work. So, they developed a new theory of physics to explain why so and conducted new experiments until they found what they were looking for. Pure physics.

And you know why these physicists were commissioned to invent the transistor? Because until then engineers could only produce boat anchors.

Blue LED? You walked right into that one ... "discovered in 1907 by the English experimenter H. J. Round" (Wikipedia). I was so intrigued when I discovered that a few years back, that I tried it, with some 120 grit SiC sandpaper. It worked. Not very well, and a kind of pale greeny-blue, but definitely a blue LED.

And it is ironic that it took scientists to turn a mere curiosity into something so practical.

[adx]

No, I'm saying that it wouldn't have taken another 84 years for me to discover NMR, or think of the potential applications, had it not been discovered by a physicist. It could have been anyone with a lab and a motivation, whether that be an engineer, physicist, or amateur. It would get easier and easier to discover by accident. Of course it would be easy to figure out, as I described.

Your noted misconceptions about the development of the transistor do not alter the fact that it was still advanced hacking. I'm not somehow against that. "So, they developed a new theory of physics to explain why so and conducted new experiments until they found what they were looking for. Pure physics." could be said of engineering too. All I am objecting to is the false dichotomy of deeming academic physics to be the basis of all engineered devices. There are many ways of achieving that, and it's not really practical to prevent that from being all (unless commercial secrecy precludes scientific study, thereby slowing down (but not stopping) advances).

Same with the blue LED. The first proper device was in 1972:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/rcas-forgotten-work-on-the-blue-led
It came from experiment (I don't care whether that was physics or engineering or whatever), it was a process issue. I also had the ‘holy shit! It’s actually a bright blue LED!’ moment in the 1990s, in almost exactly the same way - a rep had this LED in one of those LED testers and said look at this, of course all us guys peered into the thing thinking it would be nigh on impossible to see, and it almost burned our retinas out. I think he also said ‘yes, it is.’ and just disappeared down the hall. I digress, but 'I was there' not long after the birth of LED lighting. Also like Maruska, I don't begrudge the Nobel winners. I'm just against the 'physics is the source of all engineering' claptrap, as if it's an unavoidable 1-way street.

[bsfeechannel]

Your noted misconceptions about the development of the transistor do not alter the fact that it was still advanced hacking.

What those guys did was what physicists do all the time. If you want to change its name to "advanced hacking", I have no problem with that.

A Nobel Prize in advanced hacking sounds way cooler than a Nobel Prize in physics, anyway.

I'm just against the 'physics is the source of all engineering' claptrap, as if it's an unavoidable 1-way street.

OK. So name an engineering field that doesn't have its origin in--and/or whose current tenets weren't shaped by--science. Civil engineering, perhaps? Certainly not electronics. Electronics is drenched with physics and math.