August 25, 2025 • 36 mins
Hans Schantz returns to the program to discuss his new series "Fields & Energy", a historical look at physics and where it went wrong. We also discuss writing, crowdfunding projects, and the Based Book Sale.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Hello and welcome to the program.
My name is Michael Finney. Today I am joined again by Hans
Schantz. Would you like to say hello,
Sir? Hello and thank you for having
me on again. You know, it's been a while.
We talked in January. I think since then you've let me
(00:21):
curate a couple of niche sales for the Based Book Sale.
I do appreciate that. How has the Based Book Sale gone
so far in 2025? We have had a very solid year.
Last year, the Based Book sale moved about 5000 books from
(00:41):
indie authors into the hands of based readers, thanks to the
niche sales, the ones that you curated and our recent sale of
based books for male readers, aswell as the two, two of the four
quarterly sales we've had so far, we're already on top of
that. We've got about 6000 so far year
to date. So we're on track for at least
(01:03):
10 or 12, what with the two quarterly sales that we have
left. We have one coming up right
after Labor Day and our final sale is our Black Friday sale
that runs over Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
So lots more opportunities to connect based readers with based
(01:26):
authors coming up. Yeah, very much looking forward
to that. And I think that what you have
going there is a fantastic vehicle for indie writers in
general to connect with an audience that's looking for
material that they can't find ina lot of places or as difficult
to find or as not being, you know, they're as an audience,
(01:48):
they're not being catered to or as a class of writers.
They're not being supported top down from the mainstream
traditional publishing and stuff.
So I think that you do a great service in that sense.
Well, thank you very much. I do think it it fills A void
inevitably in the authors discover that writing their
story is half the battle and theother half is having to market
(02:11):
it. So we all work in our own little
domains trying to build a following and build a mailing
list and build awareness among readers of what we have.
The base book sale allows authors to come together and
pool their resources, network together and exchange the the
best of the based indie author community with all of our
(02:34):
readers. So I think the the authors and
the readers benefit from from what goes on.
But it, it's really it, it the power of the sale is in all the
authors who contribute. I just kind of sit at the center
and try to coordinate things as best I can.
Yeah, it's done very well. You know, I I have benefited
(02:55):
from it as a writer. And I think that the more people
that find it, the stronger it will continue to be.
And this is the thing too, in terms of vehicles for promoting
or making projects come to life.Let's talk about your most
recent projects. The Fund My Comic campaign for
(03:17):
Fields and Energy Book 1. Tell us how that came about, why
you chose to go with Fund My Comic, anything you feel like is
important in terms of the narrative, and how we got to
that point. Well, certainly my my first
attempt at crowdfunding a book on Kickstarter was my novel Wise
(03:40):
of Heart, a courtroom drama of biological science versus
transgenderism that brings the Scopes Monkey Trial up to date
for the 21st century. A Kickstarter approved the
campaign. It was fully funded and just a
few days from closing when they changed their mind and cancelled
(04:00):
the campaign and refunded all ofmy backers money and fund.
My comics stepped up and allowedme to re platform my sale there.
We ended up doubling the the backing that the book had
acquired on Kickstarter. So it was actually a very
positive experience for me to becancelled on Kickstarter.
(04:23):
I was weighing whether I would go just straight to fund my
comic on my next project on Fields and Energy and had a
number of friends say that I really ought to give Kickstarter
a try and I thought I'd I'd see if I could could get Kickstarter
to work for me. And they cancelled me again.
(04:44):
My my project got cancelled. They used the excuse that there
was too much AI content in my project.
I had an AI generated cover for one of the novellas that was an
add on to it. So you know, the the covers for
the main book Fields and Energy and then the other the fictional
(05:07):
novels that I have probably over$1000 in human cover art that
I've invested in making that happen were were trumped by
having the novella add on with an AI cover.
And I was also, I also acknowledged using AI to
generate my index and a few other things.
But that was the excuse that they latched onto to cancel me a
(05:30):
second time. And yet again, Fund My Comics
came to my rescue and I was ableto get my my book platformed
over there for the crowd fund. And it's, it's going along very
well so far, well over 100 backers.
And the site has really worked very well for me.
So I, I strongly recommend indieauthors, particularly if you
(05:53):
have anything the least bit controversial, to take a good
look at Fund My Comics. It's less hassle.
You don't have to worry about them yanking the rug out from
underneath you. And one of the features that's
particularly good about Fund My Comics is you can run a campaign
where they will send you the money as you earn it.
So over the course of the campaign, I've already gone and
(06:17):
spent about 500 bucks on buying some of the things I'm going to
need to fulfill the campaign when it ends.
So it makes the cash flow a little easier, so you don't have
to wait for the money to come inuntil everything's all the way
over. So that's the narrative.
On the fundraising side, the book is Fields and energy.
(06:39):
The overall project is how electromagnetism and quantum
mechanics work and where physicswent wrong.
The project grew to the point where I had to split it into
three books. So you know the I don't know if
that's bad news or good news forthe people who've been following
it that there will be 3 times asmany offerings in it.
(06:59):
But definitely good news is the first book now is ready to be
released and for readers to read.
It compiles material I've serialized on my sub stack at
etherzar.substack.com. The first book is Fundamentals
and Origins of Electromagnetism.I work through the history of
(07:24):
how electromagnetic science developed, and it's really about
the philosophy and history of science as much as it is about
the details of electromagnetism.I wrote it as best I could at a
level where curious students andintelligent lay people, as well
(07:46):
as professionals who are lookingfor some better answers about
what electromagnetism is and howit works would all have an
interest in reading the book. So that's the, that's the goal
of the project. Yeah, very nice.
Just to note, it looks like yourcampaign will be closing at the
end of August this month, the 31st 9:00 PM Eastern Time for
(08:13):
those that are interested. So by the time this airs,
they'll there will be a little bit of time left to get involved
with the fund my comic campaign.Now here is I think one question
that I think all of us really want to know the answer to in
(08:35):
regards to the Society for Post Quantum Research, and that is
this. How often do you think of Rome?
Much more often now that I have my Roman themed logo.
For my research I decided that if I was going to reintroduce
(08:56):
classical physics concepts into modern physics, into quantum
mechanics, that it would be niceto have a umbrella organization
and a logo to reflect that. So I selected SPQR, the society
for Post quantum research. The website for that is the
(09:20):
spqr.com and I used as adopt as a logo a stylized Roman eagle
signal. So you'll you'll see that on my
sub stack as well as at the SPQRdot.
Com yeah, good design. And here's the thing too, you
(09:41):
know, Really turning out a brandand experience and creating a
community. This is something that I think
that you are getting not only a lot of traction on, but a lot of
experience with. Is that something that you are
becoming more considerate of as a result of some of the other
stuff you've you've been doing and the traction you've gained
(10:04):
with it? Or is it just by nature what you
know? Tell us about that.
Well, I did start, but my original sub stack was something
that I put together to serializethe whys of Heart and I think
that worked very well. I, I got a number of readers
following the updates on sub stack and even backing me,
(10:28):
although just about everything on the sub stack was free.
So that that worked very well. Building a community and getting
some momentum going into the crowdfund to, to try to build a
brand and build a community. I've unfortunately realized once
wise the heart was over and I had finished writing it and the
(10:48):
book was released, there really wasn't much more to do with that
group. So I ended up putting it on
hiatus. I'll probably eventually revive
it when I'm ready to work on fiction again and just make it a
sub stack for my fiction work asas new fiction is coming out.
But I got too busy between running the base book sub stack
(11:14):
and that community and then developing my fields and energy
community and the SPQR. So I mean there there's only so
many communities you can try to grow simultaneously without
getting spread too thin. Sure.
Yeah, that's fair. Now let's dive into a little bit
(11:34):
of the actual nuts and bolts of the topic.
Right Fields and energy. What are you implying with the
title of the books? What I am offering is a broad
based and fundamental attack on our modern understanding of
(11:56):
electromagnetism. My thesis is that the
electromagnetic pioneers of the 19th century, people like
Faraday and Maxwell and Hebacideand Hertz, had some very
powerful and now largely forgotten insights about what
electromagnetism is and how it works in modern thinking.
(12:21):
Electromagnetism is thought to be due to 1 entity, A photon,
which simultaneously combines the mutually contradictory
properties of being a particle and a wave in one entity and it
leads to no end of paradox and confusion.
(12:42):
In my thinking electromagnetism is due to two things, fields
which are non local and behave like waves, and the fields guide
the flow of energy, which in thequantum limit looks like
particles. So in my thinking
electromagnetism isn't one thing, a photon, it's two
(13:03):
things, fields and energy, hencethe title.
The modern conception of how radiation works is the
physicists assume that if you you wiggle or accelerate a
charge, out pops a photon from the charge.
And that that's that's their model of radiation.
(13:26):
But you know, there's a a Taoistcone about considering the sound
of one hand clapping. And of course if you start to
consider the sound of one hand clapping, what you realize is
that that makes no sense becauseit takes 2 hands in order to
(13:48):
clap, and the concept of one hand clapping is nonsensical.
You've reduced clapping to a point where you you can't
explain it if you're only looking at one hand.
Well, that's precisely what modern physics has done with
radiation. The radiation of 1 charge
accelerating makes no more sensethan the sound of one hand
(14:10):
clapping, because just as with applause, it takes at least two
charges in order to have that acceleration.
In order to have radiation, you have to have two charges in it,
as in a what's called a dipole, or you have to have one charge
in an area where you've got a bunch of other charges setting
up a, an electric field to 'cause that acceleration.
(14:34):
And I, I I can go into a lot more detail, but I think that
that summarizes the difference between my thinking and the
conventional wisdom in a nutshell.
Sure. There is one thing I would like
you to expand on which I think it refers at least to one thing
that you said here. So give us a little bit more on
(14:58):
what the quantum limit is. If you look at smaller and
smaller quantities of energy, you begin to discover that it's
quantized, that instead of beinga continuum, it comes in
discrete parts. That is something that was
(15:19):
discovered in the the very late 19th century, early 20th
century, with the discovery of something called the
photoelectric effect. It turned out that only light of
a certain color was able to kickelectrons out of a metal
(15:40):
surface, that you couldn't have lots of low frequency light,
that it had to be high frequencylight in order to make it
happen. And between that and a physicist
named Max Planck who is trying to understand something called
black body radiation. If you have a cavity that is
(16:01):
heated to a temperature and infrared radiation coming out
the the aperture of the cavity, it follows a certain spectral
distribution. And in order to explain that
distribution, Planck had to argue that the energy comes in
discrete chunks. So that's not a continuum.
So between those two experimentsand the emerging experimental
(16:25):
measurements that were being made, physicists realized that
energy is quantized. And that led to a great number
of insights in atomic physics, from the Bohr model and the
early quantum theory to the moresophisticated theory of quantum
mechanics in the 1920s. What I'm hearing is it's an
(16:46):
issue of scale in general. Yes, on the macroscopic scale,
for most applications, particularly if you're in doing
radio wave or antenna engineering, which is something
I do, you really don't have to worry about having quanta of
(17:06):
energy or dealing with individual photons.
It's only when you start dealingwith atomic physics and atomic
processes of things that are happening on a very small scale
that it starts to come up. Let's think a little bit even
more abstractly, right? In the sense of like dimensional
(17:27):
concepts. When you start talking about
this size, this scale, you know,how many dimensions are we?
Are we trying to think in? Are we measuring in?
Well, we're still dealing with just, you know, the three
(17:48):
spatial dimensions and a dimension of time.
And if you want to deal with moving inertial reference
frames, you can deal with the space-time coordinates to
transfer from one coordinate system to another.
To look at things a little different way.
So the, you know, in totality 4 dimensions.
(18:10):
I'm I'm not looking at any sort of higher order geometry or
string field or string theory that requires more than just the
usual 3 + 1 dimensions. Yeah, that was where I'm headed,
you know. How do you feel about some of
these theoretical concepts in string theory going all the way
(18:34):
up to 10 dimensional physics, 11dimensional physics?
You know, how does what you're talking about now fit in with
some of that thinking or fight against some of that thinking in
coordination with the things that we've talked about on this
very small scale to almost this very abstract, theoretical,
(18:57):
gosh, you know, intangible scaleas well?
I, I guess it, it really isn't terribly relevant because the
mathematics can be enormously complex and there's, there's a
lot you can do with mathematics in order to explain things that
(19:18):
are going on in reality. The mathematician John von
Neumann famously said, you know,give me 4 points and I can plot
an elephant for you. Make it 5 and I'll make him wag
his tail. With sufficiently complicated
mathematics, you're able to model A extremely complicated
(19:42):
set of data. And I think that's largely
what's being done with string theory.
They're using very elaborate geometrical models to try to
match the observed particle spectrum and and the behavior of
the the particles zoo that you get when you make particles
collide at very high energies. And what I'm doing is really
(20:07):
just. A revival of a more 19th century
approach to physics and to a 19th century way of looking at
how how physics works. So do you see what you're doing
fitting into the math that we have continued to progress on
(20:33):
since the 19th century, or do you see some of those things
being just purely exercise and maybe not necessarily applicable
to the line of physics that you are driving on?
Well, it's a mixture of both. What I'm specifically doing
really doesn't require anything beyond the usual 19th century
(20:59):
vector calculus and the mathematics of understanding
electromagnetics as a vector field theory.
Now, that's not to say that you know all of 20th century math is
wrong. There are certainly very many
valuable things that were developed in the development of
quantum mechanics to predict andmodel what's going on.
(21:23):
My concern is that physicists have moved away from an approach
to physics in which we try to model and understand the
fundamental mental behavior. They've moved toward a model
where Shut up and calculate is the mantra of the day, where
(21:43):
it's argued that models will just confuse you because they're
always, they always have some flaws.
They are, you know, maps and notthe territory itself.
And therefore we shouldn't even bother trying to understand
what's going on in terms of a model.
(22:05):
I reject that thinking because if you try to think of physics
while trying to reject all models, inevitably what you do
is you are implicitly thinking of what's going on in terms of a
model that you are taking for granted, instead of something
(22:27):
that's well thought out and a deliberate choice.
For instance, the example I gaveof how physicists think of
radiation as being a charge wiggling and a photon popping
out. That leads to a problem called
the problem of radiation reaction, where the reaction
(22:49):
force exerted by the radiation of that emitted photon is going
to cause a reaction force that accelerates the charge further,
which means you get more radiation, which means you get
more acceleration, and so on, leading to an exponential
runaway of the charge acceleration.
And that of course isn't physical.
(23:11):
That's not what happens. If it did, then anytime you
tried to move anything, it wouldrapidly accelerate up to speed
the speed of light, and everything in the neighborhood
would be destroyed in a burst ofhigh energy radiation.
So clearly that theory is wrong.Endless cascade until collapse,
right? Yeah, absolutely.
(23:33):
So if you if you don't think clearly and carefully about your
models, you're going to end up accepting a model implicitly,
like the whole wiggle of charge in a photon pops out model and
it's going to lead you astray and it's going to lead you into
error. Interesting.
It's wild to hear some of the, Idon't know, the reckoning, you
(23:57):
know, if that's the right way tophrase it and to to look back at
something that, you know, I would assume a lot of people
think is satisfied and to then kind of reopen the book and to
begin to to try and right the ship in that sense.
(24:19):
Yeah, it it was very interestingfor me as I came across and
developed these ideas. I'm still just stunned that
someone like Hevicide or Hertz could have overlooked the the
discoveries and the insights that I've come across.
(24:40):
You can look at, for instance, in Hevicide's work electrical
papers where he talks about whathappens if you have identical
waves that are moving along a transmission line so that they,
you know they're going in opposite directions and they
will interfere with each other. And if you have mirror image
(25:04):
waves, they'll interfere with each other.
And as the waves are isolated bythemselves, they have a balance
of electric and magnetic energy.If they come together
constructively, what happens is all of the magnetic energy
changes into electric energy. If they come together
(25:27):
destructively, then all of the electric energy changes into
magnetic energy. And Hemicide describes that
process in some detail. He clearly understood how moving
waves at the speed of light havea balance of energy and how when
you do an interference you get that balance upset and the
(25:47):
energy becomes electrostatic or Magneto static.
But he didn't take the next stepof realizing, wait a moment, if
that energy is becoming static, it's stopped and the waves are
moving on past at the speed of light.
So how can that be? The answer is the energy
actually changes direction. The energy bounces and the
(26:11):
energy that was associated with the forward wave ends up
associated with the reverse waveand vice versa.
That's what I mean by my theory of fields and energy.
They take different trajectoriesin an electromagnetic system.
In that example, the fields passstraight through each other.
The forward and reverse wave. They pass through each other at
(26:33):
the speed of light. But the energy they carry, if
they're mirror image waves, thatenergy comes to a rest and is
exchanged from one wave to the other.
And surprisingly, somehow, Hevicide never picked up on
that, even though he had an accurate description of the
physical process involved, of the the shift from the balance
(26:56):
to Magneto, static or electrostatic energy.
And in fact, Hevicide is the onewho came up with the formula for
the energy velocity of electromagnetic energy.
And he just didn't. He had all the pieces and he
didn't put them together to get the the insight that these had
to be two different things, thatthe fields were guiding the flow
(27:18):
of energy, and that the fields and energy could take different
paths through our systems. He was too close to it, you
know, somebody else had to come from a different approach to be
able to make sense out of it andadvance the thinking.
That's just how it goes a lot oftimes.
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I first stumbled across
one of the key pieces of evidence when I was doing my
(27:42):
doctoral dissertation, trying tounderstand how energy decouples
from an antenna and radiates away.
And I had a very clear example that the energy that ends up
being radiated away didn't come from the antenna itself.
It came from a separate distinctplace stored in the the fields.
(28:05):
And even though I saw that, eventhough I calculated, even though
I published papers on that, I didn't get the big picture that
that was a general principle of electromagnetism of all
processes, and that fields and energy have to be two different
things because they take different paths, different
space-time trajectories in electromagnetic.
(28:27):
Systems. Well, Hans, are there things
that we haven't yet talked aboutthat you feel are important to
get into the discussion? Yeah, I think it's it's
important to understand a lot ofhow we got to where we are in
(28:49):
physics today. And that that's why I took a
historical approach because I really wanted to understand how
it was possible for physics to get so far off track and what
were the philosophical, the historical, the social, the
political issues involved in what drives the course of, of of
(29:11):
science in particular. And, you know, human events in
general. For instance, one person I talk
about a lot in my book is Francis Bacon.
And he was a very interesting character.
Modern scholarship suggests thathe may well have been the
illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth the First.
(29:36):
A number of people suggest that he may have written, or at least
coordinated, the writing of Shakespeare's plays.
But what is pretty much uncontroversial is that he
played a pioneering role in our modern view of science.
He wrote a number of books aboutarguing how science should be
(30:00):
done. And ironically, he took a look
at the people who were doing good science that he was, you
know, associated with people like William Gilbert, who was
the court physician for Queen Elizabeth, who did pioneering
work on understanding magnetism,or like William Harvey, who did
(30:21):
pioneering work understanding the circulatory system.
And he, Bacon, did not appreciate their work.
He thought they were dabblers, that they were just focusing too
narrowly on a a particular subject.
Instead, Bacon argued that science should be collectively
organized and put to use to enhance the power and capability
(30:46):
of the human race. And he wrote a wonderful little,
I guess we'd call it a science fiction novella nowadays called
The New Atlantis. It's relatively short, 40 or 50
pages depending on the font sizeof the edition that you come
across. But what he describes is how
(31:07):
settler or how explorers or the travellers from England end up
marooned on this island and theydiscover that on the island is
an institution called Solomon's House that is governing and
organizing all of the scientificinvestigation of this this
(31:27):
Kingdom. And the scholars there are have
all manner of resources that have been made available to them
to do their important work, all kinds of facilities.
They have copious assistance andapprentices who are assisting
them in their endeavors. They're divided into people who
go to foreign lands to learn what the foreigners know and
(31:49):
bring the knowledge back. People who make observations,
people who conduct experiments, people who look at experimental
results and analyze them, peoplewho look at those analysis and
come up with new experiments. It it's amazing how he treats
scientific investigation as something that can be subject to
(32:11):
that division of Labor down to very, very fine degrees.
And ultimately, the scientists of this institution are
responsible for deciding what, what science they will make
available to the Kingdom and to the kingdom's rulers and the
kingdom's people, you know, what's in their best interests.
(32:32):
It's really a foreshadowing of the modern technocratic state.
And what's also very fascinatingis that about 40 years or so
after Bacon's death, the Royal Society was founded by by
Charles Second when he came backto England in the Restoration.
(32:55):
And just six years after the founding of the Royal Society,
they published a history of the Royal Society which explicitly
called out Francis Bacon as being its inspiration.
It was full of Masonic imagery. Even though Freemasons had not
(33:16):
publicly revealed themselves andwouldn't until I think 1717, in
1660, it was very clear that they were deeply involved in
the, the Royal Society. So you take a look at that and
you can, you can see in Francis Bacon and Francis Bacon's work
and his acknowledged legacy, like the Royal Society, you can
(33:37):
see the birth of scientism, the,the cult of science, the, you
know, believe science, trust thescientists, do what the
scientists tell you, don't question them.
You know, that really saw its birth in the in 17th century
England under the direction of Francis Bacon.
(33:58):
And just following that historical trajectory is really
helpful for understanding how physics went wrong, how it got
so centralized and so subject togroup think to to end up in the
the place that it is today. I think the phrase we're looking
(34:20):
for in summation is trust the experts.
Oh, that's the fundamental tenant of of technocracy and
scientism. Well, hey, this has gone well.
A good catch up, a good conversation, a good addendum to
our previous session. In fact, I would say even with a
little bit of technological misstep in the in the beginning,
(34:47):
which no one is going to hear, you know, because we retract all
this stuff, luckily. The power of editing.
The power of technology. In fact, you know, in the future
they're going to say, you know, what did they really talk about
on that lost recording before the recording that we ended up
getting published, right? Yeah, and then an endless chain
(35:09):
of can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?
What about now? Testing 123 Well, you know,
it's, it's, it's fascinating that, you know, the Internet is
really there. There are people pushing the
Internet to be a tool for both physical and intellectual
(35:30):
control, that it should be a centralized institution for
allowing the the technocrats to micromanage and monitor all of
us. But at the same time, the
Internet is also an unprecedented tool for the
independent thinking people to compare notes, to share
(35:52):
research, to share ideas. And it's really exciting living
in times like these where you have so many people who are
caught up in just believing whatthey're told, who are the the
non player characters or NPC's who just, you know, move along
(36:12):
through their rote algorithms that have been programmed into
them. It makes it very refreshing to
be able to reach out and to connect with the, the genuinely
independent and creative thinkers out there.
And that's that's what I'm doingin my science and that's what
we're all doing together throughthe base book sale and through
(36:34):
indie writing. Absolutely, 100% agree and do
appreciate your efforts. Hans.
Again, thank you for taking the time and we'll talk again before
too long. My pleasure and thanks for
having me on.
Hello and welcome to the program.
My name is Michael Finney. Today I am joined again by Hans
Schantz. Would you like to say hello,
Sir? Hello and thank you for having
me on again. You know, it's been a while.
We talked in January. I think since then you've let me
(00:21):
curate a couple of niche sales for the Based Book Sale.
I do appreciate that. How has the Based Book Sale gone
so far in 2025? We have had a very solid year.
Last year, the Based Book sale moved about 5000 books from
(00:41):
indie authors into the hands of based readers, thanks to the
niche sales, the ones that you curated and our recent sale of
based books for male readers, aswell as the two, two of the four
quarterly sales we've had so far, we're already on top of
that. We've got about 6000 so far year
to date. So we're on track for at least
(01:03):
10 or 12, what with the two quarterly sales that we have
left. We have one coming up right
after Labor Day and our final sale is our Black Friday sale
that runs over Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
So lots more opportunities to connect based readers with based
(01:26):
authors coming up. Yeah, very much looking forward
to that. And I think that what you have
going there is a fantastic vehicle for indie writers in
general to connect with an audience that's looking for
material that they can't find ina lot of places or as difficult
to find or as not being, you know, they're as an audience,
(01:48):
they're not being catered to or as a class of writers.
They're not being supported top down from the mainstream
traditional publishing and stuff.
So I think that you do a great service in that sense.
Well, thank you very much. I do think it it fills A void
inevitably in the authors discover that writing their
story is half the battle and theother half is having to market
(02:11):
it. So we all work in our own little
domains trying to build a following and build a mailing
list and build awareness among readers of what we have.
The base book sale allows authors to come together and
pool their resources, network together and exchange the the
best of the based indie author community with all of our
(02:34):
readers. So I think the the authors and
the readers benefit from from what goes on.
But it, it's really it, it the power of the sale is in all the
authors who contribute. I just kind of sit at the center
and try to coordinate things as best I can.
Yeah, it's done very well. You know, I I have benefited
(02:55):
from it as a writer. And I think that the more people
that find it, the stronger it will continue to be.
And this is the thing too, in terms of vehicles for promoting
or making projects come to life.Let's talk about your most
recent projects. The Fund My Comic campaign for
(03:17):
Fields and Energy Book 1. Tell us how that came about, why
you chose to go with Fund My Comic, anything you feel like is
important in terms of the narrative, and how we got to
that point. Well, certainly my my first
attempt at crowdfunding a book on Kickstarter was my novel Wise
(03:40):
of Heart, a courtroom drama of biological science versus
transgenderism that brings the Scopes Monkey Trial up to date
for the 21st century. A Kickstarter approved the
campaign. It was fully funded and just a
few days from closing when they changed their mind and cancelled
(04:00):
the campaign and refunded all ofmy backers money and fund.
My comics stepped up and allowedme to re platform my sale there.
We ended up doubling the the backing that the book had
acquired on Kickstarter. So it was actually a very
positive experience for me to becancelled on Kickstarter.
(04:23):
I was weighing whether I would go just straight to fund my
comic on my next project on Fields and Energy and had a
number of friends say that I really ought to give Kickstarter
a try and I thought I'd I'd see if I could could get Kickstarter
to work for me. And they cancelled me again.
(04:44):
My my project got cancelled. They used the excuse that there
was too much AI content in my project.
I had an AI generated cover for one of the novellas that was an
add on to it. So you know, the the covers for
the main book Fields and Energy and then the other the fictional
(05:07):
novels that I have probably over$1000 in human cover art that
I've invested in making that happen were were trumped by
having the novella add on with an AI cover.
And I was also, I also acknowledged using AI to
generate my index and a few other things.
But that was the excuse that they latched onto to cancel me a
(05:30):
second time. And yet again, Fund My Comics
came to my rescue and I was ableto get my my book platformed
over there for the crowd fund. And it's, it's going along very
well so far, well over 100 backers.
And the site has really worked very well for me.
So I, I strongly recommend indieauthors, particularly if you
(05:53):
have anything the least bit controversial, to take a good
look at Fund My Comics. It's less hassle.
You don't have to worry about them yanking the rug out from
underneath you. And one of the features that's
particularly good about Fund My Comics is you can run a campaign
where they will send you the money as you earn it.
So over the course of the campaign, I've already gone and
(06:17):
spent about 500 bucks on buying some of the things I'm going to
need to fulfill the campaign when it ends.
So it makes the cash flow a little easier, so you don't have
to wait for the money to come inuntil everything's all the way
over. So that's the narrative.
On the fundraising side, the book is Fields and energy.
(06:39):
The overall project is how electromagnetism and quantum
mechanics work and where physicswent wrong.
The project grew to the point where I had to split it into
three books. So you know the I don't know if
that's bad news or good news forthe people who've been following
it that there will be 3 times asmany offerings in it.
(06:59):
But definitely good news is the first book now is ready to be
released and for readers to read.
It compiles material I've serialized on my sub stack at
etherzar.substack.com. The first book is Fundamentals
and Origins of Electromagnetism.I work through the history of
(07:24):
how electromagnetic science developed, and it's really about
the philosophy and history of science as much as it is about
the details of electromagnetism.I wrote it as best I could at a
level where curious students andintelligent lay people, as well
(07:46):
as professionals who are lookingfor some better answers about
what electromagnetism is and howit works would all have an
interest in reading the book. So that's the, that's the goal
of the project. Yeah, very nice.
Just to note, it looks like yourcampaign will be closing at the
end of August this month, the 31st 9:00 PM Eastern Time for
(08:13):
those that are interested. So by the time this airs,
they'll there will be a little bit of time left to get involved
with the fund my comic campaign.Now here is I think one question
that I think all of us really want to know the answer to in
(08:35):
regards to the Society for Post Quantum Research, and that is
this. How often do you think of Rome?
Much more often now that I have my Roman themed logo.
For my research I decided that if I was going to reintroduce
(08:56):
classical physics concepts into modern physics, into quantum
mechanics, that it would be niceto have a umbrella organization
and a logo to reflect that. So I selected SPQR, the society
for Post quantum research. The website for that is the
(09:20):
spqr.com and I used as adopt as a logo a stylized Roman eagle
signal. So you'll you'll see that on my
sub stack as well as at the SPQRdot.
Com yeah, good design. And here's the thing too, you
(09:41):
know, Really turning out a brandand experience and creating a
community. This is something that I think
that you are getting not only a lot of traction on, but a lot of
experience with. Is that something that you are
becoming more considerate of as a result of some of the other
stuff you've you've been doing and the traction you've gained
(10:04):
with it? Or is it just by nature what you
know? Tell us about that.
Well, I did start, but my original sub stack was something
that I put together to serializethe whys of Heart and I think
that worked very well. I, I got a number of readers
following the updates on sub stack and even backing me,
(10:28):
although just about everything on the sub stack was free.
So that that worked very well. Building a community and getting
some momentum going into the crowdfund to, to try to build a
brand and build a community. I've unfortunately realized once
wise the heart was over and I had finished writing it and the
(10:48):
book was released, there really wasn't much more to do with that
group. So I ended up putting it on
hiatus. I'll probably eventually revive
it when I'm ready to work on fiction again and just make it a
sub stack for my fiction work asas new fiction is coming out.
But I got too busy between running the base book sub stack
(11:14):
and that community and then developing my fields and energy
community and the SPQR. So I mean there there's only so
many communities you can try to grow simultaneously without
getting spread too thin. Sure.
Yeah, that's fair. Now let's dive into a little bit
(11:34):
of the actual nuts and bolts of the topic.
Right Fields and energy. What are you implying with the
title of the books? What I am offering is a broad
based and fundamental attack on our modern understanding of
(11:56):
electromagnetism. My thesis is that the
electromagnetic pioneers of the 19th century, people like
Faraday and Maxwell and Hebacideand Hertz, had some very
powerful and now largely forgotten insights about what
electromagnetism is and how it works in modern thinking.
(12:21):
Electromagnetism is thought to be due to 1 entity, A photon,
which simultaneously combines the mutually contradictory
properties of being a particle and a wave in one entity and it
leads to no end of paradox and confusion.
(12:42):
In my thinking electromagnetism is due to two things, fields
which are non local and behave like waves, and the fields guide
the flow of energy, which in thequantum limit looks like
particles. So in my thinking
electromagnetism isn't one thing, a photon, it's two
(13:03):
things, fields and energy, hencethe title.
The modern conception of how radiation works is the
physicists assume that if you you wiggle or accelerate a
charge, out pops a photon from the charge.
And that that's that's their model of radiation.
(13:26):
But you know, there's a a Taoistcone about considering the sound
of one hand clapping. And of course if you start to
consider the sound of one hand clapping, what you realize is
that that makes no sense becauseit takes 2 hands in order to
(13:48):
clap, and the concept of one hand clapping is nonsensical.
You've reduced clapping to a point where you you can't
explain it if you're only looking at one hand.
Well, that's precisely what modern physics has done with
radiation. The radiation of 1 charge
accelerating makes no more sensethan the sound of one hand
(14:10):
clapping, because just as with applause, it takes at least two
charges in order to have that acceleration.
In order to have radiation, you have to have two charges in it,
as in a what's called a dipole, or you have to have one charge
in an area where you've got a bunch of other charges setting
up a, an electric field to 'cause that acceleration.
(14:34):
And I, I I can go into a lot more detail, but I think that
that summarizes the difference between my thinking and the
conventional wisdom in a nutshell.
Sure. There is one thing I would like
you to expand on which I think it refers at least to one thing
that you said here. So give us a little bit more on
(14:58):
what the quantum limit is. If you look at smaller and
smaller quantities of energy, you begin to discover that it's
quantized, that instead of beinga continuum, it comes in
discrete parts. That is something that was
(15:19):
discovered in the the very late 19th century, early 20th
century, with the discovery of something called the
photoelectric effect. It turned out that only light of
a certain color was able to kickelectrons out of a metal
(15:40):
surface, that you couldn't have lots of low frequency light,
that it had to be high frequencylight in order to make it
happen. And between that and a physicist
named Max Planck who is trying to understand something called
black body radiation. If you have a cavity that is
(16:01):
heated to a temperature and infrared radiation coming out
the the aperture of the cavity, it follows a certain spectral
distribution. And in order to explain that
distribution, Planck had to argue that the energy comes in
discrete chunks. So that's not a continuum.
So between those two experimentsand the emerging experimental
(16:25):
measurements that were being made, physicists realized that
energy is quantized. And that led to a great number
of insights in atomic physics, from the Bohr model and the
early quantum theory to the moresophisticated theory of quantum
mechanics in the 1920s. What I'm hearing is it's an
(16:46):
issue of scale in general. Yes, on the macroscopic scale,
for most applications, particularly if you're in doing
radio wave or antenna engineering, which is something
I do, you really don't have to worry about having quanta of
(17:06):
energy or dealing with individual photons.
It's only when you start dealingwith atomic physics and atomic
processes of things that are happening on a very small scale
that it starts to come up. Let's think a little bit even
more abstractly, right? In the sense of like dimensional
(17:27):
concepts. When you start talking about
this size, this scale, you know,how many dimensions are we?
Are we trying to think in? Are we measuring in?
Well, we're still dealing with just, you know, the three
(17:48):
spatial dimensions and a dimension of time.
And if you want to deal with moving inertial reference
frames, you can deal with the space-time coordinates to
transfer from one coordinate system to another.
To look at things a little different way.
So the, you know, in totality 4 dimensions.
(18:10):
I'm I'm not looking at any sort of higher order geometry or
string field or string theory that requires more than just the
usual 3 + 1 dimensions. Yeah, that was where I'm headed,
you know. How do you feel about some of
these theoretical concepts in string theory going all the way
(18:34):
up to 10 dimensional physics, 11dimensional physics?
You know, how does what you're talking about now fit in with
some of that thinking or fight against some of that thinking in
coordination with the things that we've talked about on this
very small scale to almost this very abstract, theoretical,
(18:57):
gosh, you know, intangible scaleas well?
I, I guess it, it really isn't terribly relevant because the
mathematics can be enormously complex and there's, there's a
lot you can do with mathematics in order to explain things that
(19:18):
are going on in reality. The mathematician John von
Neumann famously said, you know,give me 4 points and I can plot
an elephant for you. Make it 5 and I'll make him wag
his tail. With sufficiently complicated
mathematics, you're able to model A extremely complicated
(19:42):
set of data. And I think that's largely
what's being done with string theory.
They're using very elaborate geometrical models to try to
match the observed particle spectrum and and the behavior of
the the particles zoo that you get when you make particles
collide at very high energies. And what I'm doing is really
(20:07):
just. A revival of a more 19th century
approach to physics and to a 19th century way of looking at
how how physics works. So do you see what you're doing
fitting into the math that we have continued to progress on
(20:33):
since the 19th century, or do you see some of those things
being just purely exercise and maybe not necessarily applicable
to the line of physics that you are driving on?
Well, it's a mixture of both. What I'm specifically doing
really doesn't require anything beyond the usual 19th century
(20:59):
vector calculus and the mathematics of understanding
electromagnetics as a vector field theory.
Now, that's not to say that you know all of 20th century math is
wrong. There are certainly very many
valuable things that were developed in the development of
quantum mechanics to predict andmodel what's going on.
(21:23):
My concern is that physicists have moved away from an approach
to physics in which we try to model and understand the
fundamental mental behavior. They've moved toward a model
where Shut up and calculate is the mantra of the day, where
(21:43):
it's argued that models will just confuse you because they're
always, they always have some flaws.
They are, you know, maps and notthe territory itself.
And therefore we shouldn't even bother trying to understand
what's going on in terms of a model.
(22:05):
I reject that thinking because if you try to think of physics
while trying to reject all models, inevitably what you do
is you are implicitly thinking of what's going on in terms of a
model that you are taking for granted, instead of something
(22:27):
that's well thought out and a deliberate choice.
For instance, the example I gaveof how physicists think of
radiation as being a charge wiggling and a photon popping
out. That leads to a problem called
the problem of radiation reaction, where the reaction
(22:49):
force exerted by the radiation of that emitted photon is going
to cause a reaction force that accelerates the charge further,
which means you get more radiation, which means you get
more acceleration, and so on, leading to an exponential
runaway of the charge acceleration.
And that of course isn't physical.
(23:11):
That's not what happens. If it did, then anytime you
tried to move anything, it wouldrapidly accelerate up to speed
the speed of light, and everything in the neighborhood
would be destroyed in a burst ofhigh energy radiation.
So clearly that theory is wrong.Endless cascade until collapse,
right? Yeah, absolutely.
(23:33):
So if you if you don't think clearly and carefully about your
models, you're going to end up accepting a model implicitly,
like the whole wiggle of charge in a photon pops out model and
it's going to lead you astray and it's going to lead you into
error. Interesting.
It's wild to hear some of the, Idon't know, the reckoning, you
(23:57):
know, if that's the right way tophrase it and to to look back at
something that, you know, I would assume a lot of people
think is satisfied and to then kind of reopen the book and to
begin to to try and right the ship in that sense.
(24:19):
Yeah, it it was very interestingfor me as I came across and
developed these ideas. I'm still just stunned that
someone like Hevicide or Hertz could have overlooked the the
discoveries and the insights that I've come across.
(24:40):
You can look at, for instance, in Hevicide's work electrical
papers where he talks about whathappens if you have identical
waves that are moving along a transmission line so that they,
you know they're going in opposite directions and they
will interfere with each other. And if you have mirror image
(25:04):
waves, they'll interfere with each other.
And as the waves are isolated bythemselves, they have a balance
of electric and magnetic energy.If they come together
constructively, what happens is all of the magnetic energy
changes into electric energy. If they come together
(25:27):
destructively, then all of the electric energy changes into
magnetic energy. And Hemicide describes that
process in some detail. He clearly understood how moving
waves at the speed of light havea balance of energy and how when
you do an interference you get that balance upset and the
(25:47):
energy becomes electrostatic or Magneto static.
But he didn't take the next stepof realizing, wait a moment, if
that energy is becoming static, it's stopped and the waves are
moving on past at the speed of light.
So how can that be? The answer is the energy
actually changes direction. The energy bounces and the
(26:11):
energy that was associated with the forward wave ends up
associated with the reverse waveand vice versa.
That's what I mean by my theory of fields and energy.
They take different trajectoriesin an electromagnetic system.
In that example, the fields passstraight through each other.
The forward and reverse wave. They pass through each other at
(26:33):
the speed of light. But the energy they carry, if
they're mirror image waves, thatenergy comes to a rest and is
exchanged from one wave to the other.
And surprisingly, somehow, Hevicide never picked up on
that, even though he had an accurate description of the
physical process involved, of the the shift from the balance
(26:56):
to Magneto, static or electrostatic energy.
And in fact, Hevicide is the onewho came up with the formula for
the energy velocity of electromagnetic energy.
And he just didn't. He had all the pieces and he
didn't put them together to get the the insight that these had
to be two different things, thatthe fields were guiding the flow
(27:18):
of energy, and that the fields and energy could take different
paths through our systems. He was too close to it, you
know, somebody else had to come from a different approach to be
able to make sense out of it andadvance the thinking.
That's just how it goes a lot oftimes.
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I first stumbled across
one of the key pieces of evidence when I was doing my
(27:42):
doctoral dissertation, trying tounderstand how energy decouples
from an antenna and radiates away.
And I had a very clear example that the energy that ends up
being radiated away didn't come from the antenna itself.
It came from a separate distinctplace stored in the the fields.
(28:05):
And even though I saw that, eventhough I calculated, even though
I published papers on that, I didn't get the big picture that
that was a general principle of electromagnetism of all
processes, and that fields and energy have to be two different
things because they take different paths, different
space-time trajectories in electromagnetic.
(28:27):
Systems. Well, Hans, are there things
that we haven't yet talked aboutthat you feel are important to
get into the discussion? Yeah, I think it's it's
important to understand a lot ofhow we got to where we are in
(28:49):
physics today. And that that's why I took a
historical approach because I really wanted to understand how
it was possible for physics to get so far off track and what
were the philosophical, the historical, the social, the
political issues involved in what drives the course of, of of
(29:11):
science in particular. And, you know, human events in
general. For instance, one person I talk
about a lot in my book is Francis Bacon.
And he was a very interesting character.
Modern scholarship suggests thathe may well have been the
illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth the First.
(29:36):
A number of people suggest that he may have written, or at least
coordinated, the writing of Shakespeare's plays.
But what is pretty much uncontroversial is that he
played a pioneering role in our modern view of science.
He wrote a number of books aboutarguing how science should be
(30:00):
done. And ironically, he took a look
at the people who were doing good science that he was, you
know, associated with people like William Gilbert, who was
the court physician for Queen Elizabeth, who did pioneering
work on understanding magnetism,or like William Harvey, who did
(30:21):
pioneering work understanding the circulatory system.
And he, Bacon, did not appreciate their work.
He thought they were dabblers, that they were just focusing too
narrowly on a a particular subject.
Instead, Bacon argued that science should be collectively
organized and put to use to enhance the power and capability
(30:46):
of the human race. And he wrote a wonderful little,
I guess we'd call it a science fiction novella nowadays called
The New Atlantis. It's relatively short, 40 or 50
pages depending on the font sizeof the edition that you come
across. But what he describes is how
(31:07):
settler or how explorers or the travellers from England end up
marooned on this island and theydiscover that on the island is
an institution called Solomon's House that is governing and
organizing all of the scientificinvestigation of this this
(31:27):
Kingdom. And the scholars there are have
all manner of resources that have been made available to them
to do their important work, all kinds of facilities.
They have copious assistance andapprentices who are assisting
them in their endeavors. They're divided into people who
go to foreign lands to learn what the foreigners know and
(31:49):
bring the knowledge back. People who make observations,
people who conduct experiments, people who look at experimental
results and analyze them, peoplewho look at those analysis and
come up with new experiments. It it's amazing how he treats
scientific investigation as something that can be subject to
(32:11):
that division of Labor down to very, very fine degrees.
And ultimately, the scientists of this institution are
responsible for deciding what, what science they will make
available to the Kingdom and to the kingdom's rulers and the
kingdom's people, you know, what's in their best interests.
(32:32):
It's really a foreshadowing of the modern technocratic state.
And what's also very fascinatingis that about 40 years or so
after Bacon's death, the Royal Society was founded by by
Charles Second when he came backto England in the Restoration.
(32:55):
And just six years after the founding of the Royal Society,
they published a history of the Royal Society which explicitly
called out Francis Bacon as being its inspiration.
It was full of Masonic imagery. Even though Freemasons had not
(33:16):
publicly revealed themselves andwouldn't until I think 1717, in
1660, it was very clear that they were deeply involved in
the, the Royal Society. So you take a look at that and
you can, you can see in Francis Bacon and Francis Bacon's work
and his acknowledged legacy, like the Royal Society, you can
(33:37):
see the birth of scientism, the,the cult of science, the, you
know, believe science, trust thescientists, do what the
scientists tell you, don't question them.
You know, that really saw its birth in the in 17th century
England under the direction of Francis Bacon.
(33:58):
And just following that historical trajectory is really
helpful for understanding how physics went wrong, how it got
so centralized and so subject togroup think to to end up in the
the place that it is today. I think the phrase we're looking
(34:20):
for in summation is trust the experts.
Oh, that's the fundamental tenant of of technocracy and
scientism. Well, hey, this has gone well.
A good catch up, a good conversation, a good addendum to
our previous session. In fact, I would say even with a
little bit of technological misstep in the in the beginning,
(34:47):
which no one is going to hear, you know, because we retract all
this stuff, luckily. The power of editing.
The power of technology. In fact, you know, in the future
they're going to say, you know, what did they really talk about
on that lost recording before the recording that we ended up
getting published, right? Yeah, and then an endless chain
(35:09):
of can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?
What about now? Testing 123 Well, you know,
it's, it's, it's fascinating that, you know, the Internet is
really there. There are people pushing the
Internet to be a tool for both physical and intellectual
(35:30):
control, that it should be a centralized institution for
allowing the the technocrats to micromanage and monitor all of
us. But at the same time, the
Internet is also an unprecedented tool for the
independent thinking people to compare notes, to share
(35:52):
research, to share ideas. And it's really exciting living
in times like these where you have so many people who are
caught up in just believing whatthey're told, who are the the
non player characters or NPC's who just, you know, move along
(36:12):
through their rote algorithms that have been programmed into
them. It makes it very refreshing to
be able to reach out and to connect with the, the genuinely
independent and creative thinkers out there.
And that's that's what I'm doingin my science and that's what
we're all doing together throughthe base book sale and through
(36:34):
indie writing. Absolutely, 100% agree and do
appreciate your efforts. Hans.
Again, thank you for taking the time and we'll talk again before
too long. My pleasure and thanks for
having me on.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark
My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Each week, Karen and Georgia share compelling true crimes and hometown stories from friends and listeners. Since MFM launched in January of 2016, Karen and Georgia have shared their lifelong interest in true crime and have covered stories of infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker, mysterious cold cases, captivating cults, incredible survivor stories and important events from history like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. My Favorite Murder is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including historic true crime, comedic interviews and news, science, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include Buried Bones with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You, Bananas and more.