Antenna theory...

[Gwen Patton]

When I saw the "it's just a THEORY" post go by, I sat down and wrote a
reply, because it really pushed my buttons. I keep trying to get rid of
this pet peeve, but like in Steven King's "Pet Sematary", it keeps finding
its way home again. I wrote that reply, but then I deleted it, because I
figured I'd just be screaming into the wind yet again, and didn't want to
alienate anyone with my pedantic diatribe.

Then something odd happened.

The next post was pretty much what I had written. A tad SHORTER, but still
the same basic idea. Then there was another one. And another. I found that
had I posted that original post, it would have found kindred spirits. But I
self-censored to avoid "issues". I find that I shouldn't have done that. So
I'm going to recreate that post. Lest I go too far afield, here's what I'm
responding to, Bob's reminiscence on something his Elmer said: *"As my
Elmer W4MLE told me in about 1961, Antenna and Propagation Theory are just
that, theory."*

There are two common usages of the term "theory": the scientific, and the
popular. One is a technical tool describing the collective knowledge of the
scientific community regarding an aspect of reality under study. The other
is a disparagement of that process and an attempt to belittle the
accomplishments, so contrary ideas can supplant those theories. It hinges
on the deliberate misunderstanding of the term.

A "theory", to a scientist, is a statement regarding how we think the
universe works, with regards to a specific phenomenon. It is arrived at by
stating a supposition, then creating experiments to test the supposition in
an attempt to either prove or disprove it. If it is proven by the
experiment, further experiments are designed to refine the evidence, to
discover the extent to which this understanding of reality goes, and, if
possible, to find flaws with the experimental conclusions. A "theory" is,
therefore, the best knowledge we have regarding something, based upon
experiment and observations. What it is NOT, is how the POPULAR definition
of "theory" would have us believe.

In short, the popular definition of "theory" is: *A wild-assed GUESS.*

In this definition, if the scientific assertion was actually correct, you'd
just call it a FACT. Since you WON'T call it a fact, but call it a theory,
you must not be certain of it. It must still be, in your mind, just a
GUESS. But that's not the actual definition of a theory. The "wild-assed
guess" in that equation is something called a *hypothesis.* That's the
assertion you START with, not the conclusion you FINISH with. But the
people who say "oh, that's just a *theory*" don't care. They want the
theory to go away, so they can assert their own wild-assed guess and claim
it to be fact, unopposed by some unfair *theory* thing. They want to
declare things to be facts by *consensus,* or by holding a *vote.* Famously,
this was the subject of an April Fool's hoax regarding an attempt to
declare pi equal to exactly three in Alabama, because of the Biblical
dimensions of Solomon's baptismal font ("ten cubits in radius, thirty
cubits in circumference, and round in compass"). This was as I said, an
April Fool's article, and did not happen. It DID, however, actually happen
in INDIANA, House Bill #246, proposed in 1897, and based on the
calculations of an amateur mathematician named Edwin J. Goodwin. It did not
pass, primarily because Goodwin was a total loon who couldn't do simple
math. The concept was even parodied in Robert A. Heinlein's book "Stranger
in a Strange Land".

But that's how a lot of people want to run modern day science -- by a show
of hands, not a show of evidence. But in order to do this, the concept of a
theory has to be reduced to something that can be dismissed out of hand. So
they replace the meaning of "theory" with the meaning of "hypothesis", and
like the quarter the magician made disappear at your sixth birthday, made
"hypothesis" disappear. I can't prove it, but I think they just couldn't
pronounce "hypothesis" and said "I'll just use 'theory' instead --
hypothesis is just Greek for theory, after all!" So now you have people who
will utterly ignore years and decades of experiment and evidence with a
wave of a hand and a disparaging "oh, that's just some THEORY! I'm talking
about FACT here!"

It IS true that there can be a great deal of distance between "theory" and
"practice", but that's not a disparagement of the theory, that's a
commentary on our ability to make abstracts tangible. This is the
fundamental difference between science and engineering. Science defines how
the UNIVERSE does something. Engineering defines how PEOPLE do something,
which is a whole other kettle of kimchee.

Theory isn't something subordinate to fact. It is a realistic view of fact
based upon our necessarily-limited ability to understand how the Universe
does things. We frequently assert things as fact, only to be smacked in the
face with evidence that it ISN'T fact, and never was. For example, the atom
is NOT the smallest indivisible particle of matter, no matter how many pulp
sci-fi stories said so back in the early 1900's, which goes to show you
that the popular belief, no matter how elegant, common-sense, or
widely-believed it is, usually turns out NOT to actually be "fact" after
all. Lots of people believed the Earth was the center of the Universe, and
the sun and planets revolved around it. Heck, there was even this really
huge established consensus on it. All the philosophers agreed that the sun
revolved around the Earth, and that anyone who said otherwise was just a
big FIBBER (and a heretic...burn the heretic!) who should just be quiet and
let the consensus win.

Yes, antenna theory is just theory...but that doesn't invalidate antenna
theory. It might, however, invalidate someone's beliefs or some group's
consensus. And just because someone might be bad at using the theory to
make a good antenna does not indict the theory. It indicts that person's
engineering ability. Nothing more.

Just as we shouldn't arrive at scientific conclusions by consensus, we
shouldn't invalidate the results of calculation, experiment, and
observation with dismissive false dichotomies and popular consensus either.

--

-+-+-+-+-
Jenny Everywhere's Infinite: Quark Time
http://quarktime.net
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