Abstract

This article is about radio waves. In it, the author tries to show that the present understanding of the nature of radio waves is erroneous because it is based on a false method of theoretical investigation that leads to ideas unsupported by experimental facts. The production of radio waves is unquestionably due to large currents surging back and forth along a metallic conductor, called antenna. These electric currents give rise to magnetic fields in the space around the antenna. In the overwhelming majority of cases the currents oscillating in the antenna are produced by other electric currents. The author has no knowledge of any instance in which the currents in the antenna, or the radio waves themselves, are produced by varying voltages.

These facts describe the circumstances in which radio waves are produced, but do not say anything specifically about how these waves are generated from these original causes and what is that which is waving when radio waves are said to travel through space. Present day physics tries to answer the above questions by making some wild guesses. To the ?what is waving' question the answer it gives is ?changing electric and magnetic fields that propagate on their own in space away from the antenna'. To make the whole view consistent, the question ?how are these waves generated' is answered ?these fields induce (create) each other' and travel on their own as waves. 

Careful analysis shows that these answers contradict other facts in electromagnetism and are untenable. The most important idea of this study - and which actually sparked author's interest in this subject - is the realization that neither electric fields can induce magnetic fields, nor vice-versa. If the fields cannot induce each other, then to the student who has studied electromagnetism, another possible answer might appear to be that the radio waves are just the waving lines of electric and magnetic field still bound to the charges. This is, however, contradicted by experience, which shows that the radio waves can be detected at distances very far from the antenna, thousands of kilometers away, where the intensity of the fields produced by the charges in the antenna, whether waving or not, is undetectable. 

The theory advanced in this article is that what travel away from the antenna are waves produced in the aether by the charges surging in the antenna. It follows then that, if we wish to call the radio waves by the cause producing them, we can continue to call them electromagnetic. But if we wish to call them by what they really are, we should call them aether waves. By comparison, in acoustics the wave is called by what it really is - sound - and not by the cause producing it (vibrations).