Cecil, WHAT is your hangup about "lumped-circuit"?? W8JI-Tom, Tom
Donaly, Ian White, Roy Lewallen, Gene Fuller, Reg Edwards, I, and
others I can think of are NOT, repeat NOT, absolutely NOT, most
definitely NOT, talking about a lumped-circuit model. A lumped-circuit
model in general does NOT (repeat all the above emphasis) talk about
individual charge carriers, and individual charge carriers are NOT
required to talk about all the things we've been saying. Egad, man.

I will repeat, Maxwell et al were working to explain the forces acting
on charge, and the response of charge to those forces: the motion of
charge, the acceleration of charge, the accumulation of charge.
Fields, both electric and magnetic, are simply a mathematical and
useful way to represent the forces caused by all charges (in motion,
accelerated, at rest) on all other charges in the universe. Sometimes
fields as developed in classical electrodynamics fail to accurately
represent our observed reality, but they are still useful in describing
a great many of our everyday observations, and in solving
many--essentially all--of our everyday antenna problems.

I won't say it didn't happen at all, but I certainly can't recall in
any of these "discussions" getting down to considering individual
charged particles. We're dealing with effects accurately represented
by charge expressed as a continuum, distributed over space, with abrupt
boundaries at the edges of conductors assuming the forces aren't great
enough to rip free charge loose from the wires and form corona. We are
dealing with quanta in such overwhelmingly great numbers and such small
energy per quanta that there's no point in discussing them as quantized
charge or photons. No, we're dealing with a linear system that's
sufficiently accurately represented by a set of differential equations
that all get back eventually to the interaction of a continuous
distribution of charge, not a "lumped circuit" OR individual charged
particles, which are themselves very different thing, even though we
know that our distribution of charge is made up of such particles when
viewed on a fine enough scale.

So, PLEASE wake up and quit trying to attribute this "lumped circuit"
stuff, and the completely independent charge quantization stuff, to
this discussion. It simply is NOT there. It is absolutely NOT the
point of all this.

Cheers,
Tom


Cecil wrote in a posting whose Usenet ID is available on request,

K7ITM wrote:
Understanding the congrence among many methods/theories is a very nice
thing, for it gives one confidence that they are correct, and the
ability to apply the one that's most convenient to any particular
problem. I would not want to take away wave theory, or any other valid
theory, from you; I would only ask that you better understand that your
pet is not the ONLY valid explanation.

The point is that in any disagreement between the lumped-circuit
model and a properly applied distributed network model, the
lumped-circuit model loses *EVERY* time since the lumped-circuit
model is a *SUBSET* of the distributed network model.

If your current charge concepts disagree with Maxwell's equations,
Maxwell's equations win *EVERY* time. Maxwell's equations do not
require individual charge carriers. They work just fine considering
only fields in the aether.
--
73, Cecil http://www.qsl.net/w5dxp