The Right & Wrong Way To Do (Electromagnetic) Science: Interview With Hans G. Schantz

Dr. Hans G. Schantz, Principal Scientist at the Society for Post-Quantum Physics, is currently crowdfunding Fields & Energy Book I: Fundamentals & Origins of Electromagnetism, the first volume in a three-part series aimed at reconnecting electromagnetic theory with physical reality. The book collects material Schantz has serialized at his Fields & Energy Substack. Having earned over forty patents through his work in applied electromagnetics and antenna design, Schantz brings a unique perspective that bridges theoretical physics and practical engineering.

Schantz believes that modern electromagnetic theory has gone astray by treating photons as single entities with mutually contradictory wave and particle properties. He argues that electromagnetism actually involves two distinct phenomena: non-local fields that behave like waves and localized energy that behaves like particles. Having found traditional physics education too abstract and disconnected from physical reality, he developed his alternative “fields guide energy” theory through practical engineering work. The book he is crowdfunding shares his approach, which he believes can restore physics to a more intuitive, empirically-grounded foundation rooted in nineteenth-century principles.

He discusses the methodology of science and his alternative electromagnetic theory. He also discusses the mythologized narratives in science, particularly around Einstein’s contributions, advocates for hands-on historical approaches to teaching physics, and shares insights from his antenna engineering work.

My questions appear in bold headers, with his responses in plain text.

Briggs: What is the right, and what is the wrong, way to “do” science?

Schantz: You ask deep questions. Seriously, I could right a book answering that question. In a way I have. Here’s an answer for you.

The right way to do science is to start on a firm foundation of empirical evidence. Galileo developed the fundamentals of kinematics, building on medieval foundations, by observing balls rolling down inclined planes, swinging pendula, and – as legend has it – by dropping objects off the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Newton developed his Universal Law of Gravitation, building upon the observations of Tycho Brahe and analyses of Johannes Kepler, by studying the motion of the moon and comets, and the acceleration of apples and other bodies near the Earth. Maxwell developed his theory of electromagnetism from Faraday’s observations of iron filings and the studies of Coulomb and Ampere on charges and currents, respectively. His successors like Heaviside and Hertz brought Maxwell’s theory to fruition. Heaviside was a veteran telegrapher intimately familiar with how telegraphy works, while Hertz immersed himself in a wide range of experiments to create, manipulate, and receive radio waves. “We must dwell in intimate association with the facts and with actual events,” declared Aristotle, “for in this way only can the premises be made to harmonize with the phenomena.”

Mere empiricism is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for good science. As Poincare observed, “Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.” Rutherford dismissed this kind of cataloging of facts as mere “stamp collecting.” 

Science requires a certain process and method. Great innovators in science like Newton and Maxwell created a deductive framework to explain the observations and to enable us to make accurate predictions of phenomena not yet observed. And yet, too much deduction yields armchair speculation detached from experience.

Science requires a balance of induction, deriving generalizations from particulars, and deduction, deriving particulars from generalization. The fashionable trend in today’s physics is to create ever more elaborate deductive models: to try to write equations on a T-shirt from which all reality may be deduced. The result is a host of abstract mathematical models that — taken to the extreme — merely express their authors’ prejudices about how reality ought to work, without much connection to how reality does work.

There is a third element of science that ties together induction and deduction: the model. Ideally, we derive a model through induction, by observing patterns in the data. Or we may derive a more general model that attempts to tie together more specific models. Through deduction, we generate predictions from the model, and we check to see whether those predictions align with observations. If the model fails to align, we must revise or discard it.

As a famous statistician once observed, “…models of all kinds, probabilistic or otherwise, are ways of arguing, of getting at the truth.” Mathematical models have long been considered the goal of physical science. Yet ultimately, in the words of Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal, “Science is a grand story (albeit with hypothesis testing) that emerges from our need to make sense of the world.”

Richard Feynman noted that the simple story “all things are made of atoms” contains the most amount of scientific information in the fewest words. Stories of similar explanatory power might include “all planets revolve around the sun,” or “energy cannot be created or destroyed,” or “the speed of light is the maximum speed.” In my work, Fields & Energy, I explore a similarly simple yet profound story: “fields guide energy.” I argue that electromagnetism is not due to one entity, a ‘photon’ that combines the mutually contradictory properties of non-local wave and local particle, but rather due to two entities, fields – non-local phenomena that behave like waves, and localized energy that in the quantum limit behaves like particles.

Mathematical predictions compared to experimental observations are all well and good in their place, but a simple story of reality is the scientific model for which I seek. That is my vision of the right way to do science.

It is popular in physics today to “shut up and calculate,” to eschew anything but a mathematical model of reality. For instance, Sabine Hossenfelder argues:

If you want to understand modern physics — or really any abstract ideas — you have to take it for what it is and stop trying to understand it through something else like it. There isn’t anything else like it. 

This is the problem with well-intended analogies like the rubber sheet for gravity or pairs of shoes for entangled particles or a spinning ball for spin or the like. They’re all wrong and if you take them seriously they will just confuse you.

True, the map may not be the territory, but without a good map, you are likely to get yourself lost. There are many wrong ways to do science, but stumbling blindly forward, trusting a mathematical model detached from reality is one of the worst.

Briggs: The idea of a local excitation in a field that behaves like a particle makes a lot of sense. But the idea of a  “non-local” field sounds murkier. What do you mean by “non-local”? Is it one field for all electromagnetism everywhere, or are there many fields? How does one field pass through another, as it were, or do they meld like light from two flashlights?

Schantz: “Non-local” means distributed across space. I drop a pebble in a pond. The pebble and its point of impact are localized. The resulting ripples spread out across the pond, not confined to a particular location. The ripples are non-local. More generally, “non-local” means something that cannot be attributed solely to a single position or place, but instead depends on or extends over a region.

The question of the unity of the field is a deep one that sadly is rarely examined in modern thinking. Faraday performed extensive experiments to establish the equivalence of electro-chemical, frictional, magnetic, thermal, and “animal” electricity. He concluded there was just one common kind of electricity. The last physicist to take a serious look at the question was Heinrich Hertz. He concluded that static, inductive, and radiation fields were similarly all one common field.

Today, many physicists assume that the two beams of light pass through each other without interaction – that there are as many fields as there are sources. This view is inconsistent with conventional electromagnetism for three reasons.

First, mathematical: electromagnetism is a vector field theory and at any given point in space, a vector field points only in one direction. If you have a multiple fields theory, maybe you can get that to work out somehow, but it’s not conventional electromagnetic theory.

Second, epistemological. The unity of the field is parsimonious. It explains all electromagnetic phenomena and avoids the vast complexity of having to assume all the sources of all the fields all somehow retain their individual identities at a point.

Finally, metaphysical. The whole is the sum of its parts. This principle – reductionism – is what makes engineering and science possible. We can isolate an individual factor, analyze it, and gain some understanding of physical phenomena without having to understand the vast complexity of everything that’s going on. How does one eat an elephant? One bite at a time. But just as the whole is the sum of its parts, the sum of the parts is the whole. If we want to understand the big picture, we have to add up all the parts to see the whole. 

Thilo Wünscher, Holger Hauptmann, and Friedrich Herrmann laid out the rules of energy flow in 2002 (Wünscher, Thilo, Holger Hauptmann, and Friedrich Herrmann, “Which way does the light go?” American Journal of Physics, Vol. 70, no. 4, April 2002). As two flashlight beams interfere, the fields pass through each other. The beams exchange energy with the energy from the weaker being taken up by the stronger and the stronger shedding energy to reconstitute the weaker beam as their interaction concludes. 

I showed how this plays out in a recent conference paper using antenna computational models to analyze the interaction of two beams.

With beams intersecting as in Fig. 11, Fig. 12 shows the energy exchange. On the x-z plane (y = 0), Hx -> 0. The plane of symmetry is a virtual Perfect Magnetic Conductor (PMC) through which no energy passes. If we reverse phase on one array, the plane of symmetry becomes a virtual PEC. A similar situation holds when we apply image theory to solve reflection from a physical PEC occupying the plane. Even without a physical PEC or PMC, energy reflects from a virtual plane satisfying the same boundary conditions. A virtual plane can reflect energy just like a real physical one. Yet again, fields go one way, and energy goes a different way

One case I considered was equal beams. The one beam exchanges energy with the other. The fields pass through each other at the speed of light without interaction. The energy slows down and changes direction. Fields guide energy. They are different phenomena that take different paths in electromagnetic systems.

Briggs: There are other ideas of non-locality, such as Wolfgang Smith’s vertical causation, or Everett’s Many Worlds or other forms of so-called multi-verses. I don’t hold with any kind of multiverse, but I am highly sympathetic to the idea that there is more to the world than what we can see, for there have to be good causal reasons for the things we can see. Even if we cannot know what these are. Is space all there is? Or is there something more?

Schantz: I’m not familiar enough with Wolfgang Smith’s vertical causation to have an opinion on it. Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) was motivated by taking the Schrödinger equation literally and eliminating the problematic “wave function collapse.” Instead, all possible quantum outcomes occur in parallel, branching universes. It massively violates parsimony by postulating an exponentially proliferating infinity of unobservable parallel worlds to explain why we observe definite measurement outcomes in our single branch of reality. The irony is that MWI was intended to make quantum mechanics more rational and complete, but it achieves this by multiplying reality itself beyond any conceivable bound. It’s metaphysically extravagant in service of mathematical elegance.

Every generation of physicists has believed they were approaching a complete understanding of nature, only to have their fundamental assumptions shattered by the next revolutionary discovery. This suggests that our current theories — quantum field theory, general relativity, the Standard Model — however successful, are likewise approximations. They describe certain aspects of reality accurately within certain domains, but they almost certainly miss something fundamental about the nature of things.

My money is on there being not only something more, but something more accessible once we get back on a more reasonable path of scientific inquiry.

Briggs: It’s well to treat things as the sum of their parts for engineering purposes. There is, after all, no other way to build a machine. But it seems Nature is not like this. The example I like is water: you can model your way to water even though you know all there is to know about hydrogen and oxygen. It’s not that we have more to learn and haven’t, but that water just is more than H plus O. Or do you disagree?

Schantz: I agree. You’re quite correct to observe that nature, by and large, is not a simple linear system. Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) is attributed with saying “Using a term like nonlinear science is like referring to the bulk of zoology as the study of non-elephant animals.”

We’re fortunate that so much of reality can be understood as a simple linear systems in which the whole is the sum of its parts, yet even there physicists sometimes go wrong. Electromagnetic fields behave linearly, but the energy is proportional to the square of the field intensity. This is at the heart of why fields exchange energy as they interfere with each other, and this subtlety is misunderstood by many physicists.

Electromagnetic fields do more than carry energy. They guide energy. Due to interference, energy may follow paths quite different from those of the field wavefronts. In other words, energy trajectories can diverge notably from simple geometric propagation.

Briggs: How much of our science education is built on myth? I use this word in its sense of a foundational story that tells of an essential origin, and not in its modern sense of “falsity.” That being said, how much of the myths we learn in science are in fact based on falsities?

The myth of linear scientific progress ignores the messy reality of how knowledge actually develops. Major discoveries often emerge simultaneously from multiple independent researchers, involve wholesale paradigm shifts that require abandoning fundamental assumptions rather than simply adding new facts, and are frequently rejected or ignored initially by the scientific establishment. Serendipity, accident, and technological advances often drive breakthroughs more than methodical building upon previous work. The neat retrospective narratives we construct obscure a chaotic process filled with false starts, dead ends, and bitter controversies, where practice frequently precedes theory and revolutionary ideas must overcome institutional resistance and entrenched worldviews. That’s a big part of the story I share in Book I: Fundamentals & Origins of Electromagnetism.

Modern physics is one such myth. The standard account of modern physics presents an inevitable march from classical determinism to quantum indeterminacy. In reality, philosophical preconceptions such as Positivism and Naturephilosophie played a decisive role in how discoveries were framed and understood. In Book II: Where Physics Went Wrong, I discuss why they prevailed, and how alternative approaches were marginalized. Much of this content (destined for Book II) is already available on my Substack.

I challenge the common image of Albert Einstein (1879–1955) as a lone genius, arguing instead that his work on relativity was deeply derivative, often uncredited, and that his personal behavior raises further doubts about his celebrated reputation.

First: In 1905, Einstein published four landmark papers on special relativity, the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and mass–energy equivalence later celebrated as his “annus mirabilis.” At the time, however, his work was met mostly with silence or skepticism outside Germany, where Max Planck became an early supporter. Historians like Edmund Whittaker later argued that Lorentz and Poincaré had already developed the key ideas of relativity, while defenders such as Max Born credited Einstein with uniquely clarifying simultaneity and presenting the theory in simple, compelling terms. Einstein’s lasting fame ultimately came not from 1905 but from his general theory of relativity a decade later.

Second: Einstein became world-famous after the 1919 eclipse confirmed general relativity, with newspapers worldwide hailing him as a genius. Jewish-owned outlets like the New York Times and Die Naturwissenschaften strongly promoted him, while German critics attacked relativity with political and antisemitic overtones. Despite controversy, by the early 1920s Einstein was firmly established as a global scientific icon.

Third: In 1921 Einstein joined Chaim Weizmann on a U.S. fundraising tour for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Though meant to promote Zionism, divisions among Jewish groups and press coverage shifted attention almost entirely to Einstein, turning him into an American cultural icon. Friends like Fritz Haber and Walther Nernst felt betrayed, while even fellow Zionists found Einstein’s pacifist, binational views troublesome. Publicists such as Edward Bernays may have influenced the campaign, though evidence is circumstantial. Despite controversies, Einstein’s lectures, media appeal, and celebrity-like reception cemented his fame in America and linked him to the broader 1920s cultural shift toward science as a new social authority.

Fourth: Einstein suggested Jews might share distinctive intellectual traits, but the development of relativity and quantum mechanics involved both Jewish and non-Jewish scientists, making the label “Jewish physics” misleading. Critics in Weimar and Nazi Germany used the term to target abstract, formalistic science, sometimes branding non-Jews as “White Jews.” Philosophically, Einstein moved from Mach’s positivism, emphasizing observables, toward Spinoza’s realism, insisting on underlying causal reality—contrasting with the very “Jewish physics” style critics attributed to him.

Einstein’s scientific work, particularly relativity, emerged from a German intellectual milieu shaped by Goethe’s Romantic Naturphilosophie, Austrian positivism, and earlier experimental traditions, rather than any “Jewish physics,” though cultural and social context influenced scientific approaches. His ideas faced strong opposition from German physicists like Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark, whose personal grievances, professional setbacks, and nationalist, antisemitic views fueled campaigns against him and theoretical physics, culminating in the Deutsche Physik movement under the Nazis, which attempted to replace modern theoretical physics with racially “pure” experimental work. These political and ideological pressures forced Einstein into exile, while German science became increasingly politicized and meritocracy eroded. The episode illustrates how scientific innovation, philosophical orientation, and sociopolitical forces intertwine, shaping both the trajectory of research and the public narratives of scientific figures.

Fifth: For all his faults, however, Einstein’s narrative has a redemption arc. His Mach-inspired advocacy for an observer-first approach to physics led to relativity. Yet, he was repelled by the sight of Goethe’s acolytes taking his philosophical premises to their logical extremes: “Perhaps I did use such a philosophy earlier, and also wrote it, but it is nonsense all the same.” Ultimately, it was Einstein who pointed the way toward a possible resolution to quantum paradoxes in his so-called “EPR” paper.

In summary, the history of science is as much about narrative power as it is about data.

Briggs: Even better, what is the best way to impart science? Beside your book, what are some must-reads?

Schtantz: A hands-on historical approach to physics education is ideal because it reveals how scientific knowledge actually develops through human inquiry and experimentation, rather than presenting finished theories in isolation. By combining laboratory experiments, data analysis, and theoretical calculations within historical context, students experience the same challenges and reasoning processes that led to major discoveries, developing both practical skills and deeper conceptual understanding. This method transforms physics from abstract formulas into a living, evolving human endeavor that students can actively engage with, while building critical thinking skills and showing how empirical observation and mathematical theory work together to advance scientific knowledge.

After each of the four chapters in Fields & Energy Book I, I include a list of suggested books for readers eager to learn more.

• https://aetherczar.substack.com/p/reading-list-for-chapter-1-on-generation
• https://aetherczar.substack.com/p/reading-list-for-chapter-2-aristotle
• https://aetherczar.substack.com/p/reading-list-for-chapter-3
• https://aetherczar.substack.com/p/reading-list-for-chapter-4

Briggs: I know you’ve done a lot of work with antennas. (I have a lot of hams who are readers, and some who have no idea what a radio is.) So to end this with some fun, or what seems like fun to me, what is your favorite antenna story? And what do you think of my Nobel-prize eligible theory, confirmed by observations countless times, that the best location for any antenna is also the most inconvenient location?

Schantz: I explain my passion for antenna engineering in the introduction to The Art and Science of Ultrawideband Antennas

he magic and mystery of radio have captured imaginations from the earliest speculations of radio pioneers to the present day. The marvel of radio is taken for granted in a world of pervasive and instantaneous wireless communication. All around us quiver vibrations in the æther conveying data: voices, images, and information. The magic of radio plucks these vibrations out of thin air and recovers the original data. The wand responsible for this wizardry is the antenna.

Of course, neither radios nor antennas are really magic. As Arthur C. Clarke observed, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Radio is merely the technical application of electromagnetic science to communications. The extent to which radio appears magical is the extent to which one has failed to understand the advanced technology that makes radio work (or merely takes it all for granted). By any measure, antennas are among the most mysterious and least understood aspects of radio technology—“magic” by Clarke’s definition.

Working with antennas requires more than science alone. There is a creative side to antenna design by which scientific principles are mixed with a healthy dose of imagination and distilled to yield novel element shapes. Art, according to Aristotle, is the realization in external form of a true idea. By this definition, antenna design is not only a science but also an art. Antenna designers take the true ideas of electromagnetic science and realize them in shaped and curved metallic form.

That the best location for any antenna is also the most inconvenient location is a truism of antenna design for personal devices. The story of the Apple iPhone 4 illustrates this. The iPhone 4, released in June 2010, became embroiled in what was dubbed “Antennagate:” a controversy over its external antenna design. The phone featured a stainless steel band around its perimeter that doubled as the antenna, but users quickly discovered that gripping the phone in a certain way (particularly bridging the gap between two antenna segments on the lower-left corner) could cause dramatic signal drops and dropped calls. The issue gained widespread media attention when Consumer Reports declined to recommend the device, and Apple initially downplayed the problem, with Steve Jobs infamously suggesting users simply “don’t hold it that way.” The controversy reached a crescendo when Apple held an unprecedented press conference in July 2010, where Jobs acknowledged the issue affected a small percentage of users but argued all phones had similar problems. Apple ultimately offered free cases to all iPhone 4 owners to mitigate the antenna interference, though the company maintained the issue was largely overblown while quietly redesigning the antenna in later models.

This is a spoof image, but it does raise interesting questions about the sacrifices accepted in antenna performance for the sake of aesthetics.

I would love a high-performance antenna for my cell phone. Alas, the days of the telescoping whip antenna are probably gone, so far as cell phones are concerned.

Briggs: Readers can and should follow Hans at his Fields & Energy Substack. Preorder his Fields & Energy Book I: Fundamentals & Origins of Electromagnetism.

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