The Huntsville Hamfest is this weekend! And I’ll be there at 1 pm tomorrow (Saturday) in the Redstone Room presenting Did Heaviside Delete Maxwell? Scalar Waves and Longitudinal Fields in Radio Science. Here are the details of the Hamfest, one of the largest amateur radio conventions in the US.
22 Von Braun Center South Hall
700 Monroe St SW, Huntsville, AL 35801
August 22 & 23, 2026
Hours: Saturday 9 AM — 4:30 PM, Sunday 9 AM — 3 PM
Admission (advance purchase) $12, (at the door) $15
Scouts & Royal Rangers in uniform & 12 and under: Free
Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory did not originally look like the four vector equations that now bear his name. His 1873 Treatise employed scalar and vector potentials, quaternion operators, and an “electromagnetic momentum” “A” that played a central role in his derivation of electromagnetic waves.
In the 1880s and 1890s, Oliver Heaviside recast Maxwell’s theory in terms of electric and magnetic fields, deliberately eliminating potentials that he regarded as obscuring the underlying physics. Heinrich Hertz similarly praised doing away with “unnecessary potentials.”
Yet twentieth-century developments, from gauge theory and the Aharonov-Bohm effect to quantum electrodynamics, restored electromagnetic potentials to a fundamental role.
Did anything physical disappear in the transition from Maxwell to Maxwell-Heaviside theory?
This talk separates historical fact from stronger claims sometimes made about “lost” scalar electromagnetism. It examines Maxwell’s quaternion formulation, Coulomb and Lorenz gauges, Whittaker’s scalar representations, and the distinction between gauge-dependent scalar potentials and observable fields. Particular attention is given to longitudinal electric fields in the reactive near field, where the familiar transverse-wave picture of radiation is incomplete.
The resulting picture is more subtle than either “Heaviside deleted Maxwell” or “electromagnetic waves are purely transverse.”
Heaviside simplified Maxwell without eliminating any established physical degree of freedom, but the resulting field-centered formulation can obscure the roles of potentials, longitudinal near-field components, reactive energy, and gauge choice. Revisiting Maxwell’s original framework provides a useful perspective on what radio science means by a “wave,” what actually propagates, and how electromagnetic energy flows from source to radiation.
I see Amazon is currently offering ~10% off on softcover copies of Fields & Energy Book I. Now only $18!
The Heaviside Symposium will bring together historians, engineers, physicists, mathematicians, and independent scholars over Martin Luther King, Jr. Day weekend (January 17-18, 2027) for two days devoted to exploring Heaviside’s life, work, and enduring influence.
Hosted in the “Rocket City,” Huntsville, Alabama at Signals: The Museum of the Information Explosion, participants will meet in an extraordinary venue surrounded by one of the world’s premier collections of historic communications technology, providing an ideal setting for examining the ideas that shaped the modern information age. A Call for Papers is available, and the opportunity to signup and purchase advanced tickets will be available, soon!
That’s all for now. Remember always to keep calm, and make physics great again.
More soon,
Hans
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