Scalar Energy and Longitudinal Waves: The Electromagnetic Revolution That Was Erased

There is a story buried in the foundations of modern physics that, once you see it, changes the way you understand everything from your cell phone to the stars. It begins with a Scottish genius, a set of equations so beautiful they could describe the hidden architecture of reality itself, and the systematic removal of the parts that didn’t fit the industrial agenda of the 19th century.

This is the story of scalar energy, longitudinal electromagnetic waves, and the physics that was left on the cutting room floor.

Maxwell’s Original Twenty: The Full Symphony

In 1864, James Clerk Maxwell presented his electromagnetic theory to the Royal Society of London. What he delivered was not the four tidy equations every physics student memorizes today. Maxwell’s original formulation consisted of twenty equations, written in the quaternion mathematics invented by William Rowan Hamilton in 1843. These twenty equations contained 11 vectors (representing 33 scalar components), 4 scalar quantities, plus constants for conductance, dielectric capacity, and magnetic inductance.

Quaternions are four-dimensional mathematical objects that naturally encode rotation in three-dimensional space. They are richer, stranger, and more expressive than the vector calculus that would eventually replace them. Think of it this way: if the vector notation we use today is a photograph, Maxwell’s quaternion formulation was a hologram. The photograph captures the surface. The hologram captures the depth.

Within those twenty quaternion equations lived both the transverse electromagnetic waves we know today — the Hertzian waves that carry your Wi-Fi signal and your radio broadcasts — and something else. Something that moved differently. Something longitudinal.

The Heaviside Reduction: Cleaning Up or Cutting Out?

In 1884, Oliver Heaviside, working alongside Josiah Willard Gibbs and independently of Heinrich Hertz, performed what is universally celebrated as a mathematical simplification. He took Maxwell’s twenty equations and compressed them into four, using the vector calculus notation that has become the standard language of physics and engineering.

Here is what Heaviside did: he eliminated the scalar and vector potentials from the equations, keeping only the electric field E and the magnetic field B. In the process, he threw out the scalar components entirely. The four surviving equations — Gauss’s law for electricity, Gauss’s law for magnetism, Faraday’s law, and Ampere’s law with Maxwell’s correction — describe transverse electromagnetic waves with extraordinary precision. They are the backbone of every piece of electrical engineering on the planet.

But what about the parts that were discarded?

Maxwell’s scalar potentials were not just mathematical convenience. They described a type of electromagnetic phenomenon where the electric and magnetic field vectors cancel to zero while the potentials themselves remain active. In other words: a field with no measurable force vectors, yet carrying energy and information. A standing wave that does not oscillate side to side like a Hertzian wave, but pulses along its direction of travel — a longitudinal wave in the electromagnetic medium.

This is what we now call a scalar wave.

Transverse vs. Longitudinal: Two Fundamentally Different Animals

To understand why this matters, picture two kinds of waves in a swimming pool. A transverse wave is what you see on the surface — the water moves up and down while the wave moves sideways across the pool. This is how light, radio, and all conventional electromagnetic waves behave. The electric and magnetic fields oscillate perpendicular to the direction the wave travels.

A longitudinal wave is different. Think of a slinky: you push one end, and a compression pulse travels along the length. The motion is in the same direction as the wave. Sound is a longitudinal wave. When you speak, air molecules compress and expand along the direction your voice travels.

Maxwell’s full equations allowed for longitudinal electromagnetic waves — compressions and rarefactions in the electromagnetic field itself. Heaviside’s reduction eliminated the mathematical basis for describing them. What remained was a perfectly functional but incomplete picture of electromagnetism: one that could build radios and power grids but could not account for the phenomena Tesla would later demonstrate.

Tesla’s Discovery: Waves Without Wires

Nikola Tesla was not a theorist sitting at a desk. He was a man who touched lightning.

During his famous experiments at Colorado Springs between June 1899 and January 1900, Tesla generated electromagnetic disturbances of unprecedented power and observed something that did not fit the Hertzian framework. He documented his findings in extraordinary detail — 500 pages of notes and 200 drawings that constitute one of the most remarkable laboratory journals in the history of science.

On July 3, 1899, Tesla made what he considered his most important discovery: the Earth itself contained stationary electromagnetic waves. He found that the entire planet behaved like a smoothly polished conductor with specific resonant frequencies. His experiments showed that electrical energy could be transmitted through the Earth with minimal loss — a behavior inconsistent with transverse waves (which attenuate with distance) but consistent with longitudinal standing waves in the electromagnetic field.

Tesla obtained U.S. Patent 645,576 in 1900 for his “System of Transmission of Electrical Energy,” describing a method for creating electrical disturbances between the Earth and an elevated terminal. The system did not broadcast energy outward in all directions like a radio antenna. It coupled to the Earth-ionosphere cavity and pumped energy into it as a resonant standing wave.

Tesla distinguished his waves explicitly from Hertzian waves. He called them “non-Hertzian” and described them as longitudinal in character. Where Hertz’s waves spread spherically and diminished with distance according to the inverse square law, Tesla’s waves traveled through conducting media with far less attenuation. He claimed — and partially demonstrated — that energy could be transmitted to any point on Earth through these standing longitudinal waves.

E.T. Whittaker: The Mathematical Proof Hidden in Plain Sight

In 1903 and 1904, the mathematician Edmund Taylor Whittaker published two papers that, had they received the attention they deserved, might have rewritten the history of physics.

The 1903 paper demonstrated something remarkable: any scalar potential can be decomposed into a set of bidirectional longitudinal wave pairs. Each pair consists of a wave and its phase conjugate replica — a wave and its time-reversed twin traveling in the opposite direction. The scalar potential, which Heaviside had discarded as physically meaningless, turned out to contain a rich internal structure of paired longitudinal waves.

The 1904 paper went further, showing that all electromagnetic fields and waves can be decomposed into two scalar potential functions. This means that the entire edifice of classical electromagnetism — every radio wave, every beam of light — can be re-expressed in terms of interfering longitudinal scalar waves.

Read that again: Whittaker mathematically proved that transverse electromagnetic waves are the interference pattern of deeper longitudinal waves. The surface phenomenon that Heaviside preserved is the shadow of something more fundamental that he discarded.

These papers were published in respected journals. They were mathematically rigorous. And they were almost completely ignored for the better part of a century.

Tom Bearden: Engineering the Vacuum

Lieutenant Colonel Thomas E. Bearden (U.S. Army, retired), a nuclear engineer and theoretical conceptualist, spent decades building on Whittaker’s forgotten papers and Tesla’s experimental legacy. His 2004 book, Energy from the Vacuum: Concepts and Principles, laid out a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding and engineering scalar electromagnetic phenomena.

Bearden’s central thesis is built on a startling insight from particle physics: every charge in the universe, every dipole, is already extracting energy from the quantum vacuum. The source charge problem — how a static charge can continuously radiate electromagnetic fields in all directions without any apparent energy input — is resolved when you recognize that the charge is in dynamic exchange with the virtual particle flux of the vacuum. The broken symmetry of a dipole, as demonstrated by the Nobel Prize-winning work of Lee and Yang in 1957, means that every battery, every generator, every source of EMF is already a vacuum energy device. We just waste the extracted energy by using it to destroy the very dipole that extracts it.

Bearden and his colleague Floyd Sweet developed what they called the vacuum triode amplifier, claiming to demonstrate overunity energy production — more energy output than conventional input. The Motionless Electromagnetic Generator (MEG), patented in 2002 (U.S. Patent 6,362,718), was proposed as a practical device for extracting usable electromagnetic energy from the active vacuum using asymmetric self-regauging of the magnetic vector potential.

Whether you accept Bearden’s specific claims or not — and mainstream physics largely does not — his theoretical framework raises questions that deserve serious engagement. The Whittaker decomposition is real mathematics. The broken symmetry of the dipole is confirmed physics. The virtual particle flux of the vacuum is standard quantum electrodynamics. The question is not whether the vacuum contains energy. It does. The question is whether we can engineer systems to extract it in usable form.

Why This Matters

The standard model of electromagnetism works brilliantly for engineering transverse wave technologies. But it is a subset of a larger reality. Maxwell’s original equations, Whittaker’s decompositions, Tesla’s experiments, and the zero-point field of quantum mechanics all point toward a richer electromagnetic landscape than the one we were taught in school.

Scalar waves, if they exist as Tesla and Bearden describe them, would propagate without the losses that plague conventional electromagnetic transmission. They would interact with matter in fundamentally different ways — through the potentials rather than the force fields. They would couple to the quantum vacuum rather than merely propagating through it.

This is not fringe physics wearing a lab coat. This is what happens when you go back to the original equations before they were pruned for convenience, read the mathematical papers that were published in mainstream journals and then forgotten, and take seriously the experimental observations of perhaps the greatest electrical engineer who ever lived.

The question is not whether there is more to electromagnetism than Maxwell’s four equations describe. Whittaker proved there is, mathematically, in 1903. The question is what we choose to do with that knowledge.

What would our civilization look like if we had followed Tesla’s path instead of Marconi’s — if we had engineered the longitudinal waves instead of only the transverse ones?