Cecil Moore wrote:
Gene Fuller wrote:
There is little mystery about what happens *outside* the discontinuity.

There is no "inside" to an impedance discontinuity.
The plane is two dimensional. Everything that happens
at an impedance discontinuity is "outside" of that
plane. There is no place to hide the technical facts.


The irradiance equations work fine for detailing the external effects,
but they don't give any hint of what happens inside the interface.

There is no "inside" to a plane. There is no black box
into which you can sweep the technical facts.

Cecil,

You got it right. There is no "inside" to a plane. There is also nothing
that happens exactly in that "plane". The real world does not exist in a
"plane". You continue to use ordinary external models to try to
determine how the "in-plane" action really occurs. Waves go into the
interface (plane, discontinuity, whatever) and they come back out. There
is nothing in these ordinary wave models, including the optical
irradiance models, that tells exactly what goes on inside the interface.
Even the vaunted s-parameters don't say anything about what happens to
cause reflections or other properties. They only say what one would find
from measurements made external to the "black box". (Yes, that is a term
used by H-P in AN 95-1.) Of course those external measurements are
exactly what most people would care about, and that is the main reason
for creating s-parameter formulation in the first place.

What do you suppose your ol' pal Occam would say about a model that
requires waves to be created and then immediately canceled?

73,
Gene
W4SZ