Derek sometimes wrote essays about things that seemed tangential, but were germane to his obsessive commitment to Time Travel.

Sometimes the words bordered onto fiction:

The concept of electromagnetic waves, first proposed in 1864, was met with scepticism. The foundations of the theory were complex and the conceptual framework was at odds with physical thinking. The most significant contribution to the development of the concept was James Clerk Maxwell. Others followed, rapidly on: Hertz, Heaviside, Lodge, and Fitzgerald. The Maxwellians had a heyday between 1888 and 1894. Their Great Work culminating in the 1886 transmission and reception of radio waves. In almost twenty three years, the World had gone from silence to the noise we know today.

Other times the words were simply a catalogue of events. Not events that make the stories of Great Men - "the lives of Great Men that remind us, we may make our lives sublime" to paraphrase Longfellow - but the stories of Great Ideas. Derek had a notion that Ideas were like Great Men. They are the Tulpa of Time Travellers.

The genealogy of electromagnetic waves is a rehearsal of great men of Sciences. in 1800 physicist Alessandro Volta announced the invention of a battery, allowing experiments with a stable, direct unvarying current which Hans Christian Oersted demonstrated could influence the direction a compass needle pointed leading to Andrè-Marie Ampère's demonstration of a mutual attraction or repulsion occurring between two parallel current-carrying wires depending on the relative direction of the currents. Finally around 1831, Michael Faraday demonstrated that pulling a magnet through a coil of wire would produces current.

Derek was always a little concerned about how the ranks of "Great Thinkers" had gathered to defend and attack the Tulpa. Which inevitably led to notes that pretended to be neutral, but took sides with a vengeance. Like an honest Wikipedia.

The Natural Philosophers conjectured on the manner of electrical and magnetic influence being transmitted through space. The foremost mathematician Karl Frederick Gauss, around 1855, considered the idea that electric actions propagate between the charges with finite velocity which remained unpublished. Perhaps because the Natural Philosophers favoured "action at a distance" and Gauss would need to provide a physical demonstration of his proposal if it were to be taken seriously. Michael Faraday also begun to challenge the orthodox Natural Philosophers' view, envisioning a mysterious invisible “electrotonic” state surrounding the magnet. Changes in this electrotonic state, he said, are what caused electromagnetic phenomenon. Faraday deposited documents explaining his ideas with the Royal Society of London in 1832, tor remain unopened for a century. Historians do not attach much importance to this fascinating document. Without mathematical description Faraday was merely scrying.

Maxwell was an accomplished mathematician when he left Scotland for the University of Cambridge in 1850. In 1855, after an interlude of considering colour vision, Saturn's rings, the Kinetic Theory of Gases and electrical with magnetic fields, Maxwell produced a paper: "On Faraday's Lines Of Force". Maxwell demonstrated that incompressible fluid flow mathematics could be used to solve problems with constant electrotonics. With a brief foray into avoiding death by smallpox, taking the world's first colour photograph, and developing a system of defining physical quantities known as dimensional analysis.

The Great Thinkers with Great Ideas tended to evoke a reaction of incomprehension. Not because the ideas were not sublime but because they were so far removed from the practical, tangible, Science that had preceded it. A bit like Blockchain Ledgers: familiar yet alien. Not quite the same as a big book with columns of figures scribed by some underpaid Scrivener for a Marley or a Scrooge.

In 1864 when he was 33, Maxwell presented a paper “Dynamical Theory Of The Electromagnetic Field.” He also conjectured that light is a transverse electromagnetic wave. The Royal Society audience was mystified. Maxwell had shifted in his approach from building imaginary physical models to discerning scientific truth from well established mathematical relations known as the laws of dynamics. The Audience was perplexed at the long paper of dense, abstract, argument with concepts such as vectors and fields and flux densities. More vexing was that each vector required three equations - one for each dimension.

Maxwell introduced 20 equations involving 20 variables.

All of this work was met with extreme skepticism even from his closest colleagues. Sir William Thompson - later Lord Kelvin - was one of the loudest skeptics. Kelvin refused to believe the "displacement current" could exist. There was no physical model and the only reference was the emptiness of space. The concept was repugnant. Maxwell had put his new electromagnetic theory on full public display, to be ignored.

Derek liked Great Thinkers and Great Ideas. Not simply the notion that Great Thinkers have Great Ideas but also the notion that it takes time for a Great Idea to become understandable to everyday people. Derek insisted that, once he understood an idea, it had fallen from the heady heights of being a Great Idea to being mundane. But, also, that it had a huge investment of work behind it.

Maxwell thrived on the assortment of work during his five years in London. Yearning for pastoral peace, he resigned his chair for a settled life in his old Glenlair House in Galloway in 1865. In Glenlair he wrote the “Treatise On Electricity And Magnetism.” Published in 1873, Maxwell expounded further on many of his ideas. The volume remains in print as one of the most renowned books in Physics.

His fields obeyed partial differential equations which were far more difficult to handle than Newtonian force laws. Without adequate mathematical skills, his theory of electromagnetism was inacessible. Maxwell died in 1879 at age 48 with Katherine and a friend at his bedside. Almost nobody understood his “Treatise” during his lifetime.

Oliver Heaviside the deaf, youngest son and “first rate oddity.” of a poor but respectable Victorian family was the youngest of four sons, born in 1850. Scarlet fever left him partially deaf. He grew up being self reliant and was, in many accounts, an undiscovered genius. Heaviside did well at school but a university education was beyond the family’s resources. Heaviside became an autodidact. Becoming a Telegraph Operator on the Anglo-Danish Cable from Newcastle to Denmark. Telegraph equipment of the time used visual cues, so deafness was less relevant. He was free to experiment with many electrical components like bridges and condensers. Heaviside eventually became the Troubleshooter, to whom baffled colleagues would turn. Heaviside began writing scientific papers.

Heaviside discovered Maxwell’s “Treatise”. Heaviside, working at home, developed Maxwell’s equations in their present form: reformulating Maxwell’s twenty equations into the four commonly used today.

While Heaviside’s formulation highlighted beautiful symmetry within Maxwell’s equations but also, they exposed a mystery: Electric charges have lines of electric field around them emanating from the charge. However, the Magnetic field lines have no source and appear only in continuous loops, with no start or end. Thus Heaviside invented the magnetic monopole.

In 1888, Heaviside read a report by Oliver Joseph Lodge University College Professor of Physics in Liverpool. Heaviside wrote to Lodge and discovered a kindred spirit in both Lodge and Lodge's friend, George Francis Fitzgerald, Professor of Experimental Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin. Lodge and Fitzgerald, it transpired, were captivated by Maxwell’s work and sought to carry it forward, largely through correspondence. Fitzgerald, a brilliant theoretician and lazy experimentalist, was one of the very few people who read and learned the “Treatise” in detail. Lodge complimented Fitzgerald by being comfortable using models and experimental work. Heaviside’s began immediately collaborating.

Lodge and Fitzgerald were particularly interested in finding experimental evidence to support the idea that light is an electromagnetic wave. They didn’t have much success in this endeavor initially. Lodge was experimenting with a simulated lightning system by discharging Leyden jars across wires. As expected sparks appeared between the ends of the wires. By varying the wire lengths he could make very large sparks or weaker ones and this was not expected. Lodge realized that he was seeing an electromagnetic wave in resonance. With enough power, he claimed to actually see the ionized standing wave around the wire. Lodge planned on reporting his astonishing result after returning from a holiday in the Alps. On the train out of Liverpool Lime Street Lodge read the July issue of Annalen der Physik und Chemie where an article by Heinrich Hertz had produced the same phenomenon in free space. Hertz had generated and detected radio waves. More incredibly, Hertz had measured the speed of the waves, showed that they could be refracted, reflected, and polarized the same as light.

Hertz had attracted little attention in Germany. The Maxwellians - Lodge, Heaviside and Fitzgerald - showered him with praise, welcomed him into their ranks, and began promoting his work. Lodge, for example, made a replica of Hertz’s apparatus which he demonstrated before the British Association and other groups. Heaviside elated, wrote to Hertz thanking him for the “the death blow” to action-at-a-distance theories. Their heyday lasted for a few years: 1888 to 1894. Hertz died in 1894 from a rare bone disease at the age of 36. Fitzgerald died at age of 49. Lodge lived until 1940. Heaviside corresponded with other scientists and continued publishing until he died in 1926. He is perhaps best known for his prediction that earth’s atmosphere had an ionized reflective layer capable of bouncing radio signals back to earth, such that the radio signals followed earth’s curvature. now known as the Heaviside-Kennelly layer in his honor. The vivid genius of the Maxwellians bore a promise that was engulfed in the brute technocracy of the Twentieth Century.

Heaviside wrote the prophetic words: “The great gap between Hertzian waves and waves of light has not yet been bridged, but I do not doubt that it will be done by the discovery of improved methods of generating and observing very short waves.” Derek was interested in this quote. In Derek's Central Electricity Generating Board desk diary for 1983, there on 23 November 1983, was the note:

Heaviside considered the shortening of wave forms. The Maxwellians were less concerned with the longer wave lengths and the bigger amplitudes and the unification of the Electromagnetic Spectrum with the phenomena of the slow, big, waves. Just as much as electricity and light, there is something about waves that makes sense when you stretch them out to huge distances, say the distance between North Wales and Manchester. That's the stuff of Time Travel. That, right there. That's the stuff of communicating with the past and the future and the elsewhere that Spirits might be supposed to inhabit.