Darkdev, I recommend that you get a hold of an elementary physics text. It would help clear up a lot of your questions about how waves propagate, the relations between speed, frequency, and wavelength, and about the nature of light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation. It wouldn't need to be a college level text, a good high school text should do. The concepts we're discussing here only require some knowledge of trig functions. Calculus isn't necessary. The problem with asking questions on a board like this is that the skill levels vary greatly. Even those of us who do know the subject well (for example, I'm a physicist) don't always make ourselves clear when posting. One of the limitations of the medium.

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"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." - William Thompson, 1st Baron Lord Kelvin

"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli

The problem is that I have varying levels of exposure. In grade school I was sent to the high school for calculus, but by high school I had other interests. As of late my focus is programming but cosmology is just so irresistible. I have done a good amount of research, but have also been interested and open to findings which are not commonly accepted, and hence have a somewhat tainted view... but hope to refine my "gut feel for the way everything is".

Do you mean to imply that you believe everything you know about the universe is absolutely correct?
If it was, I don't think it would be referred to as theory, as in electromagnetic theory.

dictionary.com says theory means:
2. The branch of a science or art consisting of its explanatory statements, accepted principles, and methods of analysis, as opposed to practice: a fine musician who had never studied theory.

I never studied music thoery, instead devised my own, and I can play guitar just as well as some people who have studied music theory. Sometime, I hope, better. :-({|=
(I always wanted to use that one )

No, there are always gaps and things that current theories do not fully explain. That's why science continues to evolve as our picture of the universe grows to include more effects that were not previously explained. That being said, I can be quite sure that the current theories describe and explain the effects they cover quite well.


how about this one

Actually not much better. In short, a scientific theory is something with a lot of evidence and proof behind it. Thus, the current "theory" of electromagnetism called quantum electrodynamics (developed by Feynman and others) successfully combines Maxwell's classical electrodynamics with quantum mechanics. It predicts and explains a wide variety of phenomena with phenomenal precision. I would be willing to say that it is an accurate description of how the universe works although it is called a theory.

What the non-scientist calls a theory, scientists might refer to as "conjecture"

__________________
"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." - William Thompson, 1st Baron Lord Kelvin

"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli

"Conjecturists", I would be interested IYHO of Distinti's New Gravity, based on Distinti's New EM, a superset of the accepted theory.

OK, I read the first few pages of the EM section. I'll take a look again tomorrow, but I'll tell you off the bat that I'm not impressed. We have someone trying to redo classical electrodynamics here. He uses a lot of technical terms, but I doubt he really understands them. As an example, on page 11 he "redefines" the Coulomb and Biot-Savart laws. Although he thinks he's creating a "new electro-magnetism all he's really doing is introducing a new set of units of his own creation. As an example, in coulomb "reformulation" he replaces the term (1/(4*pi*epsilon naught) with a new constant he calls K sub e. What's the difference? He replaces Faraday's law of induction with one of his own devising. It's really just a reformulation of Faraday's law with two components. Basically, he tries to rewrite Maxwell's equations in a more obtuse, confusing, and non-useful form. Then he has the gall to claim he has a better formulation than Maxwell did.

But aside from that, before he can claim to have made any improvements in EM theory he'll have to out-do quantum electrodynamics (QED). Can he predict the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron with his theory? QED has done this and many other predictions to precisions beyond that of current experiments to measure. Can he make any predictions that QED can't? I don't think so. In my brief perusal I can't see anywhere where the author tries to take QM into account and he'd need to do that to deal with these effects.

For a short description of QED check out this link.

Now I haven't read the paper in detail, and I'm just a simple experimentalist. I'll take another look tomorrow, but my guess is that my opinion won't be much different than my pal Wolfgang's.

Edited once to add the link and to correct one mis-statement. Sorry. ops:

__________________
"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." - William Thompson, 1st Baron Lord Kelvin

"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli