Should we lie to students so as to help an
electrician to wire up a house?
‘If you have got anything new … you need not expect anything but hindrance from the old practitioner even though he sat at the feet of Faraday. Beetles could do that … . But when the new views have become fashionably current, he may find it worth his while to adopt them, though, perhaps in a somewhat sneaking manner, not unmixed with bluster, and make believe he knew all about it when he was a little boy!’ – Oliver Heaviside, 10 March 1893.
In 1961 Tony knew Theory H “was the
correct one”. However, it is outside the canon. Now he ridicules it. But Theory
H has come within the canon! http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/yak.htm
. Why does Yakovlev make such a fuss about what Tony thinks is such a trivial
matter that he can joke about it (see below)? Or will Tony, as ex member of the
Board of Directors of the IEEE, lift a finger to help the IEEE to get up to
date with the Royal Society? Remember the blocking of Theory H is the first
stage in blocking Theory D. Will Tony say that Theory D is unimportant? Will he
say that he also knew Theory D while in Southampton? http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x8cbwash.htm
|
21 Dec 2018, 10:03 |
|
||
|
||||
Tony,
"While I was an electrical engineering undergraduate at Southampton University (from where I left with a BSc(Eng) in 1961 to go to GEC in Coventry, it was my understanding that Theory H was the 'correct one'. and I have not had any reason so far to change that view." - Tony
Do you still have Hammond's electromagnetism book or lecture notes from your time in Southampton?
Ivor
Electromagnetism for Engineers: An Introductory Course (Textbooks in ...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Electromagnetism-Engineers-Introductory.../0198562993
1.
Percy Hammond is Honorary Research Professor at Southampton, and is a very distinguishedfigure in the circles of electromagnetic scholarship. This book is ...
On Tue, Dec 18, 2018 at 10:21 PM Tony Davies <tonydavies_ieee@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
For what it is worth, just a brief comment based on a quick read of this:
While I was an electrical engineering undergraduate at Southampton University (from where I left with a BSc(Eng) in 1961 to go to GEC in Coventry, it was my understanding that Theory H was the 'correct one'. and I have not had any reason so far to change that view. That is not to say the Theory H is correct, there might be something better, but I do not know enough of field theory to decide about that.
As I have mentioned before my 'roots' are in circuit theory which I have never claimed to be a description of reality, but is an extremely helpful basis for designing useful things, which have performance close enough to the results from circuit theory that this is sensible and for many applications remains the best way to get to those useful outcomes. Do not forget that since there is no distance dimension in circuit theory, a transmission line approximated by one thousand ideal capacitors and inductors (of the text book type) can easily be fitted on to the point of a very sharp pin (and there is stilll room for all those medieval angels as well, if you choose to also believe in that).
Perhaps some would wonder why Theory N persists if it is incorrect. Leaving out the complexity of understanding what ExH means, and describing electricity by analogy with water flowing through pipes, etc. has been and still is, a suffiient explanation for many amateur and professional electrical technicians who have to install and repair electrical instllations in buildings and understand the IET Wiring Regulations, etc. For the general non-scientific public it is probably better to tell them that electricity is a flow of electrons and that these can move quite freely in a conductor, making it warm in the process, and melting it if there is too much current because it gets too warm. Such ideas are helpful in other situations such as the design of water-based piped central heating systems where the designer has to work out the required pump presssure (like voltage) and the diameter of the pipes (like resistors) in order to carry the required water flow (like current) to the radiators (which are actually producing most of their heat by convection rather than radiation). It is only necessary to know that the 'resistance' has a square law relationship to pump pressure and water flow to understand that the iterative calculations done by central heating designers are what an electric circuit engineer woujld do to analyse electrcal resistive networks made up of square law resistors - e.g. it is not just linear simultaneous equations, one has to use an iterative method such as Newton-Raphson (which, of course is unknown to most central heating installers).
I hope that all this gives you something nice to dream about over the coming holiday season.
Tony Davies
2018 Dec
18th
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
|
14 Jun 2020, 17:19 (6 days ago) |
|
||
|
||||
John,
Perhaps this explains
why, when I do plumbing jobs around the house,
involving the soldering of copper pipes and joints, all seems well, but the
next morning there is often water all over the floor where I was
working. I used to assume that it was bad soldering and a small hole in
the solder which I did not notice, causing the water under pressure to ooze out of the pipe.
Now I realise that the water does not flow along inside the
pipes from boiler to radiators - it is outside the pipe all the time, in an
invisible water-field which travels along the outside of the pipe.
The water which appears on the floor must therefore be the result of
local disturbances in this invisible water-field caused by little bits of
copper oxide mixed with the solder. Of course the lead in the solder will
have permanently damaged my brain anyway, because I did not first carry out a
risk assessment and decide that it would be safer for everyone to feel cold
than be warmed up by this dangerous invisible water field being guided
around the house from room to room by copper pipes..
Do you think one of
the newer universities would be willing to put on an MSc course based on this
novel theory about water flow?
Tony Davies
2020 June 14th