Roy Lewallen wrote in message ...
....
(writing about Richard Feynman's books)
I highly recommend this book, and other of his writings, if you're
interested in understanding these phenomena on a more basic level.

I strongly agree. You'll also find some interesting words about it in
the opening pages of the "Antennas" chapter of King, Mimno and Wing's
"Transmission Lines, Antennas and Waveguides."

I would go so far as to say that everything we've summarized about
"radio waves" in all our writings is all just models to explain our
observations. On some level, we don't really know what anything is;
we just have ways to communicate about those things. We have models.
Some of them seem pretty darned good, but perhaps we're just looking
at the actions in one tiny corner of our multi-dimensional universe
and we may find that all our models are woefully inadequate to cover
the big picture. So what? They work for what we're doing right now.
We can deal with the inadequacies when they arise. We can stay
constantly on the lookout for them, and accept them and learn from
them. A couple hundred years ago, Newtonian physics seemed adequate,
and for the time, for what people were observing and designing, it
was. But we've learned more, and refined our models. You should
expect it will continue to happen, as long as curious humans are
around to ponder the problems. In fact, just because our models are
somehow "better" now than they were five years ago, or fifty, or five
hundred, that doesn't necessarily mean that the earlier models are now
worthless. You just need to know their limitations, and apply them
only where the limitations are practically unimportant. We still use
Newtonian physics for a lot of engineering work because it's not worth
the effort to add relativistic terms when we know that they won't be
observable, and other errors will dominate.

Cheers,
Tom