If you are reading this preface you are probably involved in designing and laying out logic circuit boards. I have a story to tell you which you will not find on the internet or in other books. What I have to say has been put to practice and it works. It is not complicated but it is different. In this book, I ask you to go back to the basics so that I can explain the future. I hope you are willing to put forth the effort to go down this path.

I would like to thank my wife Elizabeth for her encouragement and help. She never complained when I spent days on end at my computer writing and rewriting. It takes a lot of dedicated time to write a book.

I would like to thank Dan Beeker of NXP Semiconductors. He is a principal engineer in Automotive Field Engineering. I have given many seminars arranged by Dan over the years. Using the material in my seminars he has been very effective in helping designers avoid problems. His experiences are proof that the material in this book, when put to practice, really works. His success has spurred me on. Highlights of this understanding are blocked out in the text as Insights.

This book presents some ideas that I have not seen in print or heard at conferences. I know that this does not prove that these ideas are new or novel. It could mean that I have not talked to the right people. My contact with engineers tells me they mainly come out of the same molds in school. The basic math and physics that is taught revolves around differential equations that in most cases solve problems using numerical techniques.

Computers work well in antenna design and in moving energy in wave guides. For a long time the problem of wiring circuit boards has been considered trivial and has not received very much attention. One of the reasons is that people have been getting by. That is no longer the case and it is time for a change. A big part of the problem is that sine waves and antenna or microwave design methods are not a fit for transmission lines on circuit boards where step functions, delays, and reflections take center stage.

To whet your appetite here are a few ideas that are treated in this book:

1. Logic is the movement of energy
2. Not all waves carry energy
3. We cannot measure moving field energy directly
4. Waves deposit, convert and move electric and magnetic field energy on transmission lines
5. Radiation only occurs on leading edges
6. Energy in motion is half electric and half magnetic
7. Via positioning controls radiation
8. Transmission lines can oscillate
9. Waves can convert stored electric field energy to stored magnetic field energy
10. Waves can convert stored magnetic field energy to stored electric field energy
11. Waves can convert stored energy into moving energy

In my career I have written 14 books, all published by John Wiley &Sons. I am 92 and I have been retired for some 25 years. That has not stopped me from giving seminars, doing consulting, and writing books. I often reflect on what keeps my writing and how I seem to be almost singular in my approach to interference issues. A lot has to do with the opportunities given to me in my career. Since this will probably be my last book I thought this would be an opportunity to provide the readers with some of my personal background. A lot of people have helped me over the years and my story is unique.

I was born in Highland Park, a suburb of Los Angeles, California on January 4, 1925 to immigrant parents who had no understanding or interest in science. I grew up in the great depression of the thirties when a cup of coffee was 5 cents. Cellophane and zippers were not a part of life. The last horse‐drawn carriages brought fresh vegetables to our street. There was the ice man and houses had ice boxes. Raw or pasteurized milk was delivered in bottles by the milkman before I got up. Radios blared soap operas all day.

My early experiences with things electrical were crystal sets, radios, and building an audio amplifier. I learned how to measure voltage and calculate current flow. I used an oscilloscope in school to observe circuit voltages. I observed magnetics in terms of loud speakers, motors, and transformers. I formed images of current flow and voltage patterns. I knew about radio transmission and antennas from my amateur radio friends, but this area was a mystery to me. It was not until I entered college that I was introduced to electromagnetic fields. By then I had enough mathematics to work a few simple problems but my understanding of the electrical world was still very limited.

I started playing violin at age 4½ and my father got me a scholarship. I walked a mile to elementary school and I remember the Maypole in the playground. I walked a mile over a hill to Eagle Rock High School where I had my first brush with geometry, algebra, physics, and electric shop. I had some fine teachers. Ben Culley, one of my math teachers, went on to be dean of men at Occidental College. We had a radio at home and that intrigued me. I pestered the local radio repair shop and was allowed to help out by testing tubes. We had no automobile but I made the effort to bicycle to the Friday night lectures at Caltech. I saw the 100‐inch Mount Wilson telescope lens when it was moved out of the optics lab. I saw the demonstration at the Kellogg high voltage lab. In my teen years I was leaning toward things electrical. Then Pearl Harbor was bombed. I remember Roosevelt’s famous “infamy” radio speech. In 3 weeks I turned 17. I remember the air raid sirens and the blackouts. I remember when the Japanese shelled the west coast and the searchlights came on. I remember gas masks were issued and there was gas and food rationing. Members of my class were volunteering into the services and big changes were taking place in the lives around me.

I was drafted into the army in the April of 1943 and did basic training in Fresno, California. The army sent me to Oregon State College as part of an Army Specialized Training Program. I had my first bus and train ride. At OSC I had a few basic engineering courses. Much of the class material was a review for me. It was decided that the war was not going to last decades and the education of future engineers was not a high priority. My start in college lasted about 6 months and I was shipped off to the 89th infantry division at Hunter Liggett Military Reservation in California. I was given a course in radio repair at Fort Benning, Georgia. The division eventually ended up crossing Germany in Patton’s third army. I saw bombed out cities. I watched and heard the bombing during the Rhine river crossing. I did my calculus through the University of California correspondence course in this period. I remember working problems when one of our own aircrafts was shot down because he was firing on us. The army went as far as Zwickau and I saw the exodus of slave labor. They were walking back to their home cities with no food or belongings. Our division uncovered one of the concentration camps. This was the first knowledge I had of what had been going on in Europe in the preceding years. It was hard to grasp.

After hostilities, it took months before we could return home. The war was still in progress in the Pacific. This meant that there were only so many ships available. I visited London, Brussels, Edinburgh, and Glasgow on passes. I saw the Loch Ness. Since I was a violinist, I took the opportunity to join a GI symphony orchestra. I spent a month in Paris before we were moved to Frankfurt. It was a big transition—from army life in war to a home in a French mansion. The orchestra toured Germany and Austria entertaining troops. I saw a lot of Europe including the war crimes trial at Nuremburg and the inside of Hitler’s bunker in Berlin. We played in the Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna, in the Wagner Festspiel Haus in Beirut, and in Garmisch Partenkirchen. For a kid that had never left home, I had quite an adventure in the army.

Three years in the service and I finally returned home. I wanted to use the GI bill to get a college degree at Caltech. I was 21 years old. The first thing I did personally was add a room to our home so that I had a place to study. The backlog of students trying to continue their education was long and my only option was to take the junior entrance exam. I was given credit for my classes at Oregon State and my correspondence course. I studied all summer so that I could take exams in English, math, chemistry, and physics. I was one of six that was accepted. I chose physics as my major as I really did not know what direction to take. I finished my senior year without enough credits to graduate. I came back for two more terms and nearly finished all the courses needed to get a Masters in EE. I had used up my GI bill. I had a difficult time starting as a junior but somehow I made it. I graduated with the class of 1949. I still remember that my first physics course was given by Dr. Carl Anderson, the Nobel prize winner that discovered the positron. I was in a different world. I had no more funds and I had to go to work.

My first job was with a company called Applied Physics Corporation in Pasadena, CA. I worked for George W. Downs, a respected technical consultant with ties to Caltech, the US Navy, and the Atomic Energy Commission. My first assignment was to build a dc amplifier for Douglas Aircraft. In 1950, there were only vacuum tubes for gain. I was shown a circuit that used a mechanical chopper to stabilize a feedback amplifier. Vacuum tubes require hundreds of volts to operate and there had to be transformers to isolate the circuits from utility ground. My first dc amplifier and power supply weighed over 70 pounds. Looking back, it is hard to believe that this was progress. Based on what had been learned, my next dc amplifiers were much smaller and a group of amplifiers shared one power supply. These early designs were bought by the aircraft companies to handle the signals from strain gauges and thermocouples. These were the days when the first jet aircraft was still on the drawing board. I was given the job of building four analog computers that paralleled work done at Caltech. Each of these computers filled a room and used the dc amplifier designs I had worked on. These computers were sold to Lockheed, Douglas, and North American Aircraft.

Digital computing was in its infancy. When my first boss was asked whether analog or digital computing was best, he responded—“Get them both. You need all the help you can get.” If I were asked whether field theory or circuit theory is best I would have to answer a little differently. You need to use them both. One alone is not sufficient.

Our group of designers were moved to Transformer Engineers, another Pasadena company. I invented a way to build dc amplifiers and avoid voltage regulation using two blocks of ac gain, feedback, and a mechanical chopper to reduce the size of a channel but management did not want to enter this market. Four of us including George, left and formed our own company called Dynamics Instrumentation. The new design was a viable product and within a year I had invented a reasonably good differential amplifier that provided a bandwidth of 10 kHz. I began to understand that each amplifier channel needed its own power supply or there would be system oscillations. Following soon were the days of the first transistors and the instruments were getting smaller and more sophisticated. This was the period when rocket engines were being tested for space exploration. As semiconductors developed I was eventually able to build differential amplifiers without mechanical choppers that were extremely stable.

I began to write small articles that were used as sales tools. There was essentially no written material available for engineers to study and these articles were very effective sales tools. These articles about shields, the shielding of instruments and the grounding of cable shields, led me to write my first book. Much to my surprise Wiley accepted my manuscript for publication. What I did not know was that the engineers buying the instrumentation had little to say about how the facility would handle the cables and their terminations.

Of course, grounding and shielding involves far more than testing aircraft or rockets. It involves electronics in medicine, research, manufacturing, and computers. Instruments had to function in adverse environments and survive when there was nearby lightning activity. I learned how to protect input circuits from significant overloads. Input noise levels of 2 microvolts rms in 100 kHz were accepted standards and yet the instruments were protected even if the power line were connected to the input. Instruments could operate with 300 volts ground potential differences between input and output.

As a principal in my own company I had the opportunity to visit and talk to engineers in facilities all over the United States. They were very willing to show me their testing installations and rooms full of electronics. A typical rack would be opened up and all I could see was a bundle of cables a foot in diameter coming out of the floor and fanning out to hardware. It was impressive and I had no idea of what this meant from the standpoint of performance. All I knew was that if I tested an instrument on my bench it would meet my published specifications. All of this contact gave me an understanding of electronics which I did not get in college.

Dynamics came to an abrupt halt as a company in one of the big cutbacks in defense spending. I went to work for a company that supplied equipment to the telephone industry. I remember being shown the special earth ground that had been brought up into the lab. This was apparently standard practice in the telephone industry. The chief engineer felt strongly that this connection would ensure that electronics could be tested in a “quiet” environment because this ground was available. I did not respond because all of my experience indicated that this ground was of little importance. To me it was just another earthed conductor along with water pipes, gas lines, and electrical conduit. The only difference was they each had a special title.

The telephone system in those days rang bells by placing a voltage between one telephone line and earth. The telephone systems would work even though there was a power outage as the system ran on batteries where the positive lead was grounded. The ground conductor I was shown was a part of telephone practice. I later became chief engineer of that company and never once did I use that special ground.

I understood the philosophy of grounding analog amplifiers. I had built analog circuits and found that “hum” pickup was reduced if I grounded my circuits to a nearby conduit. My approach in instrumentation had been that if I had to use special grounds to get performance, my design was inadequate. What I was learning was that this search for “good ground” had caught on and was accepted as good engineering. I found the idea that a good ground would work for a facility regardless of its size ridiculous. But as I traveled the country I found this idea had taken hold and was accepted as good practice.

As an April fool’s joke I submitted a news article to an electronics magazine describing that the perfect ground had been discovered near Nome Alaska and it was being protected against contamination by a fence.

I had occasion to visit a deep space antenna facility in the Mohave desert. There was a circle of buildings with a central point acting as ground for all the electronics. This ground was made from buried copper rod. The power for each building was supplied through a nearby distribution transformer that was grounded (earthed) at the transformer per the electrical code. The problem occurred during thunder storm activity. Lightning would strike the earth causing a potential difference between the central ground and the utility ground at each building. A nearby lightning strike would place thousands of volts across the coils of the distribution transformer. The result was that these transformers were being blown up. This grounding practice was written into law and quality control would not accept any change to this practice. What bothered me the most was that the engineers we talked to had no idea of what was wrong. They were interested in the performance of individual pieces of hardware and the facility issues were not their domain.

This single‐point grounding practice was what I saw in most major defense installations. All the shields for all the signals were bundled together and connected to this “good” ground. The simple physics in my book showed why this could not work, but no one paid attention to what I considered to be obvious. Buildings are not circuits and the single point grounds that worked in many applications could not function in these large environments. They thought they knew where the interfering current entered the sink but no one asked where the current came back out of the earth. The idea of skin effect was never considered.

The first electronic instruments I designed were full of shielded conductors. This is labor intensive and adds a lot of bulk and cost to a design. My last designs used no shielded conductors. In feedback structures, most of the interference is cancelled. Knowing how to route signals and how to control impedance levels, use differential techniques made for simple layouts. In the end, there were no calculations—just technique and it worked.

Making things work well and at the same time keeping things simple is a challenge. There are only so many coupling mechanisms. Understanding that both interference and signals obey the same laws is key to finding answers. When I viewed a facility problem my circuit experience served me well. I could see the problem in terms of the spaces not the conductors. The rules people usually follow involve conductors without regard to the geometry. For example, the service entrance to a residence requires a grounding conductor. The intent is to provide a path for lightning to earth. If the conductor is routed around a door or along a wall for any distance to get to a water pipe, it will not function even though it passes inspection. People follow rules. They have no choice.

I visited a facility in New Mexico that assembled live missiles for the air force. The fear was that an ESD event might arm a missile. I was called in because a missile had somehow been armed. Every worker at a bench wore a conducting wrist band that was connected to his or her bench and seat. The floors were conductive and the walls of the building were corrugated steel. This facility was located in an area where lightning frequency is high. When I arrived, there was a group of inspectors in white smocks and with clipboards touring the facility looking for any rule violations. I was told that if there was a chance of lightning, the building would be evacuated.

I noticed that the building had lightning arrestors on the roof eaves and that there were down‐conductors from these arrestors to grounding posts. Then I saw a television antenna that was taller than the lightning protection. What I saw next was that lightning would use the corrugated steel walls as a down conductor, not the down‐conductors provided. The problem then was that lightning using this path would arc to earth at floor level. Missiles were located on the other side of the wall just feets from the points of possible arcing. I recommended that the building steel be grounded at points around the perimeter of the building. Any arcing at this level could easily arm a missile. The lesson here is that following written rules does not always solve problems. Common sense is important.

My music provided another side to my life that was unusual. I play chamber music and this has brought me in touch with some very interesting people. In Pasadena, I played music with Rupert Pole who was married to Anais Nin, the famous diarist. I played music with Alice Leighton, wife of Robert Leighton, who helped write the famous Physics Lecture Series with Dr. Feynman. Stuart Canin, who became concertmaster of the San Francisco Symphony was concertmaster of the GI Symphony and played for Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin in Potsdam during our stay in Berlin. At the time, this was done in secret.

I had a similar experience when the GI orchestra was stationed in Frankfurt. I played quartets (background music) for a group of officers holding a fancy dinner party at a castle on the banks of the Rhine river. They were living it up with a group of army nurses. I would have never seen the inside of a castle if it were not for music.

My first book was published by John Wiley and Sons in 1967. This was a period in time when rocket engines were being developed. The title of this book was Grounding and Shielding in Instrumentation. The main problem I addressed was related to limiting interference to microvolts when the input signal lines ran thousands of feet between rocket stands and instrumentation bunkers. Designing instrumentation amplifiers using vacuum tubes that worked in this environment meant I had to understand interference from both internal and external sources. I had solved the instrumentation problems but the users had to understand their role in handling long input cables. It is a long story but in later years I found out that my recommendations were largely ignored. Performance was impacted but obviously systems worked well enough to get men on the moon. I have rewritten Grounding and Shielding every 10 years and the 6th edition just came out in 2016. I have no doubt that many of the shielding issues that I discuss in my books are still not being handled correctly. What often happens is that as new technology enters the scene the old problems simply fade away. It is not comforting to realize that progress often takes this form. A lack of understanding persists and it will cause problems in some future effort. We seldom argue with a practice if it works. I do not like invalid arguments that supported bad practice. It leads to problems in the future.

I found it very rewarding to put my understanding into the written word. Writing it down on paper forces me to be accurate. My understanding in many areas was challenged and I had many things to learn. My first book brought me consulting jobs as well as opportunities to teach seminars. The more contact I had with engineers the more convinced I became that they were not using the physics they had been taught in school. It was through my books that Dan Beeker found me and asked me to do a few seminars for his company.

These early seminars were not directed at the world of circuit boards. They covered areas of power distribution, radiation, and instrumentation. The subjects of grounding and shielding were treated for both analog and rf circuits. Facility design, lightning protection, ESD, screen room design, and radiation from antennas were all key topics. My talks had one thing in common: the problems of interference were all field related. For Dan’s audience, I began to include topics related to transmission lines on circuit boards. Dan heard my talk dozens of times. I contradicted many of his pet ideas. I told a story that was different than other speakers. Much to his credit he began to see a light and he began changing his approach to board layout. He has become very successful at trouble shooting problems using a new set of ideas. His boards work the first time.

Electronics has changed dramatically over the last 50 years. My early experiences were analog. The world is now largely digital with the communication between devices being wireless. The thing that has not changed is that circuit board layouts can have problems. The signals have greater bandwidth but the same physics of electricity and magnetism applies. This book is intended to provide tools to designers so that logic circuit boards can function at maximum clock rates and so they will function reliably and pass radiation tests. It is also intended to give IC manufacturers a system view of logic operations.

There are several levels to the design of logic circuit boards. The design involves selecting processors, memories, clock systems, power supplies, buffers, and drivers. A second aspect is the layout. This includes the number of board layers, the location of components, type of board materials, trace characteristics, the number of ground planes, and how power is distributed. A complete design requires interconnecting the pins and pads, using conducting planes, traces, and vias. This set of connections seems like an elementary problem, not one requiring engineering attention. There is a lot to “wiring” a circuit board. It is not only a problem of interconnecting logic but also one of moving energy.

What makes the problem difficult is that we are getting to the point where every picosecond is important. This is no longer the domain of circuit theory.

I could provide the reader with a set of rules to follow and then there would be no book to write. I feel that it is necessary to explain electrical activity in terms of electromagnetic fields. This way the reader will have two sets of tools to use in the future. I want to do this so that no matter what the future holds the reader will be prepared. I want to present this material in a straightforward way. There is no way to avoid some mathematics. The one thing I know for certain is that fields explain things that circuit theory misses.

Fields are not components and they cannot be seen. Progress is usually made by using old materials in new ways. The changes that are taking place are adding to logic rates and radiation, and they are in the direction to reduce signal integrity. Progress is made by keeping the fundamentals in full view. The fundamentals I am referring to are the electromagnetic fields that define all electrical phenomena. We are designing products where new tools must be put in the tool kit. My goal is to point out these tools. You have to learn how to use them. There is a recognition that a new technology is needed to make further progress. Until that happens we need to make optimum use of the products we have. Whatever is invented, it will be based on physics and circuit theory will have to step back a little further.

A better understanding of the electrical world did not come until I started to design hardware and tried to reduce noise levels, increase bandwidth, and interface with utility power. At every twist and turn there was some parasitic effect that could only be explained by using my physics background. It took time but I learned that every component had both an ideal and a practical character. Voltage sources were not zero impedance and switches were complex objects. I soon learned to be suspicious of everything including conductor geometry. Every circuit was unstable until I ran tests. I designed some logic circuits and observed that there were many new performance limits to consider. I watched wire‐wrap technology evolve and disappear and then multilayer boards take over. As the technology evolved I was able to present my understanding every 10 years in 6 editions to my Grounding and Shielding book. In my seminars I started to slant materials toward circuit boards that perform logic functions. This led me to spend a lot of time working on transmission lines that handle digital information. Most of the material that exists in the literature relates to sine waves and little is written as it relates to step functions. I had some questions about Poynting’s vector and step functions and got no help from my physics friends. Eventually I put together a picture of what happens when waves reflect at a discontinuity. It took time but I finally realized that what was happening on a logic board was the movement, storage, and conversion of energy. I finally understood that if you give nature an opportunity to move energy, you can meet goals in moving information. This energy is moved in fields in the spaces between conductors. The traces act as guides that control where the energy can flow. This book is written to describe this energy flow in detail. It may surprise you that there is so much to say.

The path I have taken to understand electrical behavior is perhaps unique. There are few books devoted to the relationship between electrical interference and the basic physics of electricity. I know the pressure to understand the world is there because this is what engineers do. They make things work when there are forces at play that limit performance. I am familiar with the trial‐and‐error approach and I also know that explanations of why something works are often in error. I know because I have been a part of this process. Fortunately, I had a good education and I keep challenging my own explanations. The truth is that in the process of learning I have often been in error. My excuse is that essentially no one has offered me criticisms or advice. The physicists I know have never built their own circuit boards or wound their own transformers, so they have had no experience solving the types of problems I was forced to deal with. I was very much on my own. There was always a feeling of recognition for my writing efforts but there has been essentially no feedback. One of the biggest problems we all have is discussing our inadequacies. Another problem is taking positions that are contrary to accepted practice. It is always easy to use the local jargon and accept the opinion of the boss. The lore that prevails is working (sort of), so why be contrary. I also know that spending a billion dollars on an approach does not make it right. It does make it very difficult to criticize.

I feel I have a good picture of interference processes. When I attend a conference, I can usually tell when a speaker has a convoluted understanding. The paper is published, the audience applauds, and life goes on. If I give a presentation, the listeners react the same way. Because there is a big gap in understanding, both presentations are probably ignored and the listeners are left looking for understanding. They will come back next year hoping for a better experience. My hope is that I can open a door just far enough so that a correct understanding can take root.

Emotions often run high in areas where opinions differ. I understand the effort that it takes to be an engineer. It is human nature to defend a position that has taken years to establish. There are engineers that feel strongly that field theory explanations are the wrong approach. I feel just as strongly that they are the ones in error. Many are successful designers that are not afraid to speak out. My experiences tell me to remain firm. Nature is not going to change one iota just because we explain phenomena in different ways. Many designers invent new languages that seems to catch on like a virus. This practice unfortunately places impediments in the communications channel. I understand the dynamic nature of language but I also realize the need for accuracy and stability. No one is changing the words voltage or inductance, but often engineers forget that these words are defined in terms of field theory.

Learning electricity is an ongoing process for engineers. We cannot see electricity, so we must live with a stream of interconnected concepts. Sometimes, what we think we understand is flawed. Until we are challenged, these flaws are not recognized. The first thing we try to do is fit the facts we see to the ideas we feel comfortable with. I remember in college studying the same material over and over, each time adding a level of complexity. The same thing happened when I went to work designing hardware. Some of the learning involved applying new materials and some of it was related to a better understanding of the past. Lately, learning has involved going back to basic physics as circuit theory is showing its limitations. Going back is only a part of the process. In my early attempts at design I had little idea of just how to proceed. First inclinations were to experiment with the materials at hand. When experimentation was not practical, I asked my boss.

I remember the first time I encountered a shield in a power transformer. I was not sure where to connect this shield. There were several choices including the instrument enclosure, common signal, or equipment ground. I asked by boss who was a very respected engineer. His response surprised me. He proceeded to light up his pipe. The delaying tactic said he did not know. Later in my career I realized there was no simple answer. We were building high‐quality equipment and a shielded transformer represented this higher quality. In fact, it made little difference where this one shield was connected. I now realize he was being honest and that we both had a lot to learn. It took years before I found the answer to my question.

Later in my career I worked on differential amplifiers that required the use of transformers with three shields. I built my own shielded transformers and found out how to use this shielding to build a wideband differential instrumentation amplifier. I wrote the specifications and got a transformer house to make the transformers. The company saw this as a business opportunity and added “Isolation Transformers” to their product line. These transformers found application in the early computer installations that were being used in the defense industry. I wrote about these transformers in my Grounding and Shielding books.

One day I was scanning an electronics magazine and noticed an ad by this same company for a four‐shield “Isolation” transformer. I had no idea of how four shields might work so I called the president of this company hoping to learn something about shielding. I asked the obvious question “Where do you connect this fourth shield?” The answer was honest. “I do not know.” Then I asked the question “Why do you offer this shield?” The answer was equally honest. “It sells more transformers.” That answer has stayed with me for 50 years. Looking back, I can see that there is an element of desperation in engineering that requires action even if the reasoning is not well founded.

It became obvious to me that a building was not a circuit. There was no way to use my meters and an oscilloscope to measure its properties. Even if I could describe the building as a circuit, there was no way I was not going to redesign it. A building and its conductors are a “given” and I was not going to change buildings. Experimenting with buildings is not an easy thing to do even for governments. I decided I had to design “islands” of space that I could control. Meanwhile, I saw efforts to design buildings that were supposedly “quiet,” “clean,” or “radiation proof” that no one could test. As we all know, engineering cannot be based on hope or unfounded ideas. Testing buildings is not an easy thing to do.

I have reached the conclusion that there are significant problems in observing electrical behavior whether it be a circuit board or a building. There is much that cannot be seen. Of course, if the circuit works, we are not apt to be too critical. We cannot see under traces or on traces between board layers. We cannot see inside of components or inside of conductors. We cannot see current distributions, let alone current flow. These limitations are obvious. What I have just mentioned only touches the surface. What we cannot see and what we do not look for are the shapes of the fields that occupy the spaces between conductors. These fields carry the energy yet in more ways than one they are inaccessible. Voltages give an indication of electric field, but we are blind to the magnetic field that must be present. Some of this blindness is of our own doing. It is possible to infer what is happening but it takes effort.

It is possible to study the physics of electricity and not see its relevance. The mathematics is one thing but sensing the movement of energy is at another level of understanding. The energy stored in the earth’s gravitational field is enormous. We walk around in this energy field and pay little heed until there is an event. The fact that this field warps time is completely out of our picture. All of this is at the heart of nature and it takes a real effort to recognize that we live in fields our entire life. To put it simply, we are blind to fields unless we make a very special effort. Fields dominate the first chapter. These electric fields are the very fields of life as they form molecules from atoms. These same fields operate our circuits and we know a great deal about them. That does not mean it is impossible. We came into this world not knowing the shape or size of anything. It all had to be learned. Electricity is no different. The big problem is we cannot touch or feel it. This means we must create our own images. Often these images need correction and that takes courage and time. Habit is at the heart of our survival. Not all habits are in our best interest. They are hard to change.

The beauty of physics is that it explains the present and shows us the way to the future. It is not dedicated to any one discipline. Physics is constantly being challenged and matched with experience. The links between experience and what is basic is not always obvious. It takes time and a strong desire for understanding before the cobwebs are removed. This effort is very personal in character and usually does not transfer to others working in the same discipline. When the understanding solves problems, there is often a financial benefit and that does get attention.

This book presents some ideas that I have not seen published or discussed. It is the result of trying to connect together all the pieces of my understanding. In one sense it says I am making progress. In another sense it says I have a lot more to learn. What I have learned I have tried to put into words. It is not easy to accept new ideas and connect them with past experiences. It takes effort and time. I hope this book can help you understand better the electrical world. May your designs work well the first time.