RE: Variable Capacitance and Inductance

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Paul Nicholson by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <paul-at-abelian.demon.co.uk>

I've read some of the posts on this thread and it's clear that
David hasn't got much of a clue what he's on about.

There are no scientific issues at stake here - nobody needs to present
data or arguments to prove anything.  David needs to do some basic 
study on his own - concentrating on understanding what voltage,
current, inductance, capacitance, charge, EMF, etc actually mean. 
Right now David is wasting everyone's time and making a nonsense of the
list by carrying on as if his naive ideas based on elementary mistakes
represent some new work that needs to be discussed in a scientific way.

It is not the inductance of David's coil that is varying, it is his
measurement of the inductance that varies.  The gross variation 
mentioned is undoubtably due to carelessness in not excluding line
frequency induction.  That ought to be obvious.  David needs to sort
himself out and learn a lot of basic concepts, as well as learning
how to do measurements, how to do 'science'.

At present, David makes a post with elementary errors, someone corrects
it, and David responds to them as if they are presenting an alternative
scientific theory, to be discussed and argued.  You can't pretend to
do 'research' on a subject upon you know little or nothing about with-
out making a fool of yourself.  We're heading for a repeat of the
70-odd long, daft, and pointless list posts we had recently on
Wheeler's formula.

Sorry, I'm not going to bother to go over all the trivial errors in
David's posts - I'm sure they're obvious to all and I'm not going to
do David's studying for him.

The crass and ludicrously arrogant suggestion that the laws of
inductance are wrong, based on a few faulty measurements, is only
matched in sheer lunacy by the enthusiasm with which other list
members encourage this bull and try to elevate it to the status of
a 'theory'.  Perhaps in future we should just respond to this kind of
trolling with references to suitable textbooks in order to avoid silly
debates on non-issues?

I notice that the notion of effective inductance differing from the
'DC' inductance has crept into this non-discussion. That certainly 
isn't anything new - its just one of those things that are obvious 
from the definition of inductance and the Neumann integral - it
definately isn't mine or Terry's 'new theory'. We take the trouble to
test for it not to prove the underlying physics - that's ancient stuff,
but to satisfy ourselves that we're applying it correctly.

As a general point, when we get answers that are unexpected we do not
suppose that so-and-so great scientist who first worked out the basic
physics was wrong.  Instead we look to our own errors of which there
are many. We have measurement errors, programming errors, errors which
occur because we apply bits of physics in the wrong context, errors
which occur because sometimes we have to make approximations, errors
because we have mis-interpreted the results, errors because we see what
we want or expect to see, errors in which we get the right experimental
results but draw the wrong conclusions, and nastiest of all - the
errors in our work that we don't yet know about!

Tiptoeing through this personal minefield of error is what the methods
of science are there to help us with.  Goodness knows, in this field of
Tesla coiling doing any sort of 'research' requires some sort of effort
on the part of the researcher to give themselves a thorough grounding
in basic electrical engineering and basic physics, and to acquire an
appreciation of what the methods of science are there for.

Fortunately, I've noticed that you don't need to know anything
very advanced - you just need to be really solid on the basics and you
can make great progress. Tssp hasn't turned up anything original or
made any new laws.  It's just an example of carefully applying some
very basic laws of electrics to the TC.  We're applying Kirchhoff's,
Faraday's, Coulomb's, Ohm's, Biot-Savart laws - all really basic stuff
that you learn at school, not university. We call it 'research' when
really it's just an exercise that might help us make better coils.  We
apply the methods of science, not because we're doing 'new' stuff, but
simply to try to avoid making errors.  It's as well for list members
to remind themselves of that from time to time, and not get carried
away with the fanciful notion that any of us are doing 'New' science.
--
Paul Nicholson
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