Re: TC Secondary Currents - was ( Experimental Help - Terry?)

["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>

Hi Terry,

> We definitely should not ignore things we know to be wrong!

Agreed, but I'm sure that folk must get fed up with the endless cycle
of crank assertions followed by refutations, with never any results
to show or progress made.  Reading such threads makes for a very 
haphazard way to learn the physics of TCs.

> Often, we need to "bring them up to speed".

Indeed that's what the list does so well.  I've learned so much from
the experienced coilers on here.  But then I'm lucky to have enough
background knowledge of science to sort out the good stuff from the
rubbish.

> Saying something is wrong is useless, you also have to show them
> the right way.

That's fair, but do they listen?  I'm talking about the cranks, not
the genuine novices and experimenters who soak up new ideas like 
sponges and then come back at you with better ones.  No, the cranks
continue with their entrenched views no matter how clearly you spell
things out. They just seem to put the caps lock on and repeat their
unfounded assertions, along with the usual accusations of conspiracy
and orthodoxy.

> It IS hard, but we are killing BIG dinosaurs here!!

Oh I wish we could get around to disposing of some of the myths and
misunderstandings that still abound.  But we're getting hung up by
these cranks as they try to resurrect those dinosaurs which are
already long dead.

> "I" however, am glad I didn't spend much time looking for
> the magnetic fields of displacement currents

Yes, the time would be better spent measuring the current profile of
a short h/d coil or flat spiral, by the resistance insertion method,
(er, did that sound too much like a hint to the experimenters?)
But such an experiment is difficult and tedious, and will overturn no
physics, it will not get you noticed, it will not get you a free trip
to Stockholm to collect a cheque, and there'll be no TV crews camped
on your lawn.  I'm afraid it's just good boring old science, the bed
rock of small careful experiments by which we build up an understanding
of the way the universe works. The same boring science that gives
you medicines that work and planes that fly, will also give you a
TC that works by design, if you give it a chance.

> the vast majority of such topics never make it to the list

You do a fantastic job of keeping out most of the junk. The mind
boggles at what you must have to reject.  We are lucky to occupy a
delicate bubble of sanity.

> There is a section of our hobby that does not like the Tesla list
> because their ideas simply will be shredded here.  Far safer to
> boast of the great idea in a less critical list. 

That's interesting.  I often wonder how significant the pupman list is
in the big wide world of TCing.  Wonder what percentage of the world's
coilers are present on here?  And who are all the 800+ recipients of
the list - net of the minority who regularly post? 

> when we have an idea, post it to see what others think without
> concern if it is right or wrong.

Absolutely.  We hopefully can rely on each other to point out one
another's mistakes.  When I put my ideas to the list, I expect them
to be challenged and put to the test.  I'm counting on the list
community to tell me where my assumptions and calculations are wrong,
as they often are!  And we should all make full use of that facility
because that's how to make progress in a scientific sort of way.

You've got to be able to admit that you're wrong, otherwise the 
process doesn't work, and you gain only inert schools of dogma, rather
than an evolving and reliable system of knowledge.

It's worth considering just how we can know things are wrong.  In
science we can never really tell when something is right - at best we
can assign some degree of confidence to it.  'The universe is an
11-D manifold' is a less confident statement than 'the earth is a
planet' or 'Curl H = J + dD/dt'.  But we can disprove things with
much more strength.  For example, any hypothesis must survive the
following tests:
a) it must be self-consistent, ie must not contradict itself, by for
example requiring that 2 + 2 = 3, or by requiring that a statement is
both true and false.  If it contains that type of error, it can be
immediately discarded without any need to refer to nature.
b) it must not contradict established results without being able to 
say exactly why those results were faulty, and being able to replace
those results with something better.
c) it must be capable of being falsified.

And it must survive those tests in order to be 'called' a hypothesis
in the first place.

Only when an idea has made it that far is it worth considering whether
nature actually works that way.  If an author ignores reasonable
criticism and continues regardless, then they are cranky by any
reasonable definition.  Why spend time and money carrying out
experiments to test a hypothesis which isn't even self-consistent?
We all lose out because the experiments that have some chance of
bearing fruit are postponed.

> Some of us have been successful and crushed too many times to
> care about that little detail anymore

A good attitude.  A decent scientist has ten good ideas before lunch,
but by tea time will have discarded nine or ten of them.  Maybe
one idea a month will survive the obvious cross checks.  Maybe two
or three times a year an idea will get through (a)(b)(c) above and
be published in a paper. Perhaps only once or twice in a career will a
scientist's ideas contribute a new genuine bit of knowledge. Lets face
it, scientists spend most of their time being wrong, so they get used
to it, and are prepared for it, and they try very hard to prove
themselves wrong before even opening their mouths on a subject. And 
when they do speak, they must be prepared to fully justify every
statement they make.  It's certainly a vocation that excludes all but
the toughest of people.  Anyone who attends graduate school will have
plenty of practice at standing in front of a panel of experts and
experience being uncomfortably wrong. 

This is in stark contrast to the pseudoscientist, who contrives to
avoid criticism in order to carry a duff idea further than it deserves
to go.  The language of science is employed, but not its methods,
hence the name.

The scientist must have a vigorous and open mind, and must be willing
to discard a notion just as soon as it becomes untenable. The contrary
is to be narrow-minded, to latch onto something and cling to it to
a desperate and pathological extent.

> However, if an idea is specific to Tesla coiling and is not totally
> unfounded, we should take a pass at it.

I wonder just how 'totally unfounded' an idea has to be before being
rejected.  The TC community seems to have a willingness to toy with
totally unfounded ideas unlike any other branch of electrical
engineering.  Material on the net is dominated by the full spectrum
of crank subjects.  When I came to build my coil, I could find nothing
in any of my textbooks, and nothing of use on the web. I could find no
recipe or formula that would allow me to design my coil, at least none
that were clearly based on sound engineering.

An extraordinary state of affairs.  Why is it that TCs are in the
doldrums like this?  If you looked for info on any other topic, eg
antennas for radio astronomy, you would find loads of accurate, well
founded and useful data.  Is it because nobody has been doing those
boring and tedious experiments from which real progress is made? If
I wanted to design a microwave antenna, I could do so at my desk, and
it would work first time, thanks to the thousands of man-years of
research that's gone into that field.  Not so for a relatively simple
thing like a TC.  Something's gone wrong. The field has stalled. 

Lets welcome those who wish to explore new ideas and new avenues of
TC research, those with energy, brains, and an open mind.  They must
be given the opportunity to flourish in this relatively 'green' field
without being hindered by all the mystical and meaningless baggage
that has has passed off as 'theory' for so long.
--
Paul Nicholson
--