The Right & Wrong Way To Do (Electromagnetic) Science

Written by William M Briggs on September 2, 2025. Posted in Current News

Dr. Hans G. Schantz, Principal Scientist at the Society for Post-Quantum Physics, is currently crowdfunding Fields & Energy Book I: Fundamentals & Origins of Electromagnetism, the first volume in a three-part series aimed at reconnecting electromagnetic theory with physical reality

The book collects material Schantz has serialized at his Fields & Energy Substack. Having earned over forty patents through his work in applied electromagnetics and antenna design, Schantz brings a unique perspective that bridges theoretical physics and practical engineering.

Schantz believes that modern electromagnetic theory has gone astray by treating photons as single entities with mutually contradictory wave and particle properties.

He argues that electromagnetism actually involves two distinct phenomena: non-local fields that behave like waves and localized energy that behaves like particles. Having found traditional physics education too abstract and disconnected from physical reality, he developed his alternative “fields guide energy” theory through practical engineering work.

The book he is crowdfunding shares his approach, which he believes can restore physics to a more intuitive, empirically-grounded foundation rooted in nineteenth-century principles.

He discusses the methodology of science and his alternative electromagnetic theory. He also discusses the mythologized narratives in science, particularly around Einstein’s contributions, advocates for hands-on historical approaches to teaching physics, and shares insights from his antenna engineering work.

My questions appear in bold headers, with his responses in plain text.

Briggs: What is the right, and what is the wrong, way to “do” science?

Schantz: You ask deep questions. Seriously, I could write a book answering that question. In a way I have. Here’s an answer for you.

The right way to do science is to start on a firm foundation of empirical evidence. Galileo developed the fundamentals of kinematics, building on medieval foundations, by observing balls rolling down inclined planes, swinging pendula, and – as legend has it – by dropping objects off the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Newton developed his Universal Law of Gravitation, building upon the observations of Tycho Brahe and analyses of Johannes Kepler, by studying the motion of the moon and comets, and the acceleration of apples and other bodies near the Earth.

Maxwell developed his theory of electromagnetism from Faraday’s observations of iron filings and the studies of Coulomb and Ampere on charges and currents, respectively. His successors like Heaviside and Hertz brought Maxwell’s theory to fruition.

Heaviside was a veteran telegrapher intimately familiar with how telegraphy works, while Hertz immersed himself in a wide range of experiments to create, manipulate, and receive radio waves. “We must dwell in intimate association with the facts and with actual events,” declared Aristotle, “for in this way only can the premises be made to harmonize with the phenomena.”

Mere empiricism is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for good science. As Poincare observed, “Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.” Rutherford dismissed this kind of cataloging of facts as mere “stamp collecting.”

Science requires a certain process and method. Great innovators in science like Newton and Maxwell created a deductive framework to explain the observations and to enable us to make accurate predictions of phenomena not yet observed. And yet, too much deduction yields armchair speculation detached from experience.

Science requires a balance of induction, deriving generalizations from particulars, and deduction, deriving particulars from generalization. The fashionable trend in today’s physics is to create ever more elaborate deductive models: to try to write equations on a T-shirt from which all reality may be deduced.

The result is a host of abstract mathematical models that — taken to the extreme — merely express their authors’ prejudices about how reality ought to work, without much connection to how reality does work.

There is a third element of science that ties together induction and deduction: the model. Ideally, we derive a model through induction, by observing patterns in the data. Or we may derive a more general model that attempts to tie together more specific models.

Through deduction, we generate predictions from the model, and we check to see whether those predictions align with observations. If the model fails to align, we must revise or discard it.

As a famous statistician once observed, “…models of all kinds, probabilistic or otherwise, are ways of arguing, of getting at the truth.” Mathematical models have long been considered the goal of physical science.

Yet ultimately, in the words of Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal, “Science is a grand story (albeit with hypothesis testing) that emerges from our need to make sense of the world.”

Richard Feynman noted that the simple story “all things are made of atoms” contains the most amount of scientific information in the fewest words. Stories of similar explanatory power might include “all planets revolve around the sun,” or “energy cannot be created or destroyed,” or “the speed of light is the maximum speed.”

In my work, Fields & Energy, I explore a similarly simple yet profound story: “fields guide energy.” I argue that electromagnetism is not due to one entity, a ‘photon’ that combines the mutually contradictory properties of non-local wave and local particle, but rather due to two entities, fields – non-local phenomena that behave like waves, and localized energy that in the quantum limit behaves like particles.

Mathematical predictions compared to experimental observations are all well and good in their place, but a simple story of reality is the scientific model for which I seek. That is my vision of the right way to do science.

It is popular in physics today to “shut up and calculate,” to eschew anything but a mathematical model of reality. For instance, Sabine Hossenfelder argues:

If you want to understand modern physics — or really any abstract ideas — you have to take it for what it is and stop trying to understand it through something else like it. There isn’t anything else like it.

This is the problem with well-intended analogies like the rubber sheet for gravity or pairs of shoes for entangled particles or a spinning ball for spin or the like. They’re all wrong and if you take them seriously they will just confuse you.

True, the map may not be the territory, but without a good map, you are likely to get yourself lost. There are many wrong ways to do science, but stumbling blindly forward, trusting a mathematical model detached from reality is one of the worst.

Briggs: The idea of a local excitation in a field that behaves like a particle makes a lot of sense. But the idea of a “non-local” field sounds murkier. What do you mean by “non-local”? Is it one field for all electromagnetism everywhere, or are there many fields? How does one field pass through another, as it were, or do they meld like light from two flashlights?

Schantz: “Non-local” means distributed across space. I drop a pebble in a pond. The pebble and its point of impact are localized. The resulting ripples spread out across the pond, not confined to a particular location. The ripples are non-local. More generally, “non-local” means something that cannot be attributed solely to a single position or place, but instead depends on or extends over a region.

The question of the unity of the field is a deep one that sadly is rarely examined in modern thinking. Faraday performed extensive experiments to establish the equivalence of electro-chemical, frictional, magnetic, thermal, and “animal” electricity.

He concluded there was just one common kind of electricity. The last physicist to take a serious look at the question was Heinrich Hertz. He concluded that static, inductive, and radiation fields were similarly all one common field.

Today, many physicists assume that the two beams of light pass through each other without interaction – that there are as many fields as there are sources. This view is inconsistent with conventional electromagnetism for three reasons.

First, mathematical: electromagnetism is a vector field theory and at any given point in space, a vector field points only in one direction. If you have a multiple fields theory, maybe you can get that to work out somehow, but it’s not conventional electromagnetic theory.

Second, epistemological. The unity of the field is parsimonious. It explains all electromagnetic phenomena and avoids the vast complexity of having to assume all the sources of all the fields all somehow retain their individual identities at a point.

Finally, metaphysical. The whole is the sum of its parts. This principle – reductionism – is what makes engineering and science possible. We can isolate an individual factor, analyze it, and gain some understanding of physical phenomena without having to understand the vast complexity of everything that’s going on.

How does one eat an elephant? One bite at a time. But just as the whole is the sum of its parts, the sum of the parts is the whole. If we want to understand the big picture, we have to add up all the parts to see the whole.

Thilo Wünscher, Holger Hauptmann, and Friedrich Herrmann laid out the rules of energy flow in 2002 (Wünscher, Thilo, Holger Hauptmann, and Friedrich Herrmann, “Which way does the light go?” American Journal of Physics, Vol. 70, no. 4, April 2002).

As two flashlight beams interfere, the fields pass through each other. The beams exchange energy with the energy from the weaker being taken up by the stronger and the stronger shedding energy to reconstitute the weaker beam as their interaction concludes.

I showed how this plays out in a recent conference paper using antenna computational models to analyze the interaction of two beams.

With beams intersecting as in Fig. 11, Fig. 12 shows the energy exchange. On the x-z plane (y = 0), Hx → 0. The plane of symmetry is a virtual Perfect Magnetic Conductor (PMC) through which no energy passes. If we reverse phase on one array, the plane of symmetry becomes a virtual PEC.

A similar situation holds when we apply image theory to solve reflection from a physical PEC occupying the plane. Even without a physical PEC or PMC, energy reflects from a virtual plane satisfying the same boundary conditions. A virtual plane can reflect energy just like a real physical one. Yet again, fields go one way, and energy goes a different way

One case I considered was equal beams. The one beam exchanges energy with the other. The fields pass through each other at the speed of light without interaction. The energy slows down and changes direction. Fields guide energy. They are different phenomena that take different paths in electromagnetic systems.

Briggs: There are other ideas of non-locality, such as Wolfgang Smith’s vertical causation, or Everett’s Many Worlds or other forms of so-called multi-verses. I don’t hold with any kind of multiverse, but I am highly sympathetic to the idea that there is more to the world than what we can see, for there have to be good causal reasons for the things we can see. Even if we cannot know what these are. Is space all there is? Or is there something more?

Schantz: I’m not familiar enough with Wolfgang Smith’s vertical causation to have an opinion on it. Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) was motivated by taking the Schrödinger equation literally and eliminating the problematic “wave function collapse.”

Instead, all possible quantum outcomes occur in parallel, branching universes. It massively violates parsimony by postulating an exponentially proliferating infinity of unobservable parallel worlds to explain why we observe definite measurement outcomes in our single branch of reality.

The irony is that MWI was intended to make quantum mechanics more rational and complete, but it achieves this by multiplying reality itself beyond any conceivable bound. It’s metaphysically extravagant in service of mathematical elegance.

Every generation of physicists has believed they were approaching a complete understanding of nature, only to have their fundamental assumptions shattered by the next revolutionary discovery.

This suggests that our current theories — quantum field theory, general relativity, the Standard Model — however successful, are likewise approximations.

They describe certain aspects of reality accurately within certain domains, but they almost certainly miss something fundamental about the nature of things.

My money is on there being not only something more, but something more accessible once we get back on a more reasonable path of scientific inquiry.

This is taken from a long document, read the rest here substack.com

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