“If you have got anything new, in substance or in method, and want to propagate it rapidly, you need not expect anything but hindrance from the old practitioner – even though he sat at the feet of Faraday… beetles could do that… he is very disinclined to disturb his ancient prejudices. But only give him plenty of rope, and when the new views have become fashionably current, he may find it worth his while to adopt them, though, perhaps, in a somewhat sneaking manner, not unmixed with bluster, and make believe he knew all about it when he was a little boy!” – Oliver Heaviside, “Electromagnetic Theory Vol. 1″, p337, 1893.

Heaviside of course screwed up by leaving school at 13 and learning maths himself, then writing Maxwell’s 20 long winded differential equations in 4 vector operator equations. Notice that they are still called “Maxwell’s equations” despite never being written by Maxwell! Heaviside never got proper credit for anything, because he did not have a PhD (in fact he never went to university). People prefer to delude themselves that Maxwell did everything. Maxwell fiddled sound theory in Part 3 of his paper, “On Physical Lines of Force” (January 1862), getting the right answer (light speed) from wrong working. His elasticity theory is wrong and the predicted speed is really c/2^(1/2). Maxwell quietly corrected the error in a new paper in 1865, getting the same answer, but without the flawed theory. A.F. Chalmers’ article, ‘Maxwell and the Displacement Current’ (Physics Education, vol. 10, 1975, pp. 45-9): “the change was not explicitly acknowledged by Maxwell”. All Maxwell did was to play with equations because Weber had already shown empirically in 1856 that the root of the ratio of electric to magnetic force constants was the speed of light. Maxwell just had to fit a wave equation to this and Faraday’s law, using Faraday’s own theory of 1846, “Thoughts on Ray Vibrations”, and Maxwell had complete flexibility to choose any equation for “displacement current” he liked to get the right answer, but still he screwed it up and took THREE YEARS to correct it. But still he is worshipped, despite the problems his aether caused physics and despite the conflicts with his wave theory of light and the observations that led to quantum theory and the Bohr atom, which ignore Maxwell’s wave theory.

However, we all have to worship Maxwell, not Heaviside who came up with the Heaviside layer (ionosphere for radio communication), the 4 Maxwell equations, the theory of the transmission line, and mathematical insights. Maxwell’s horseshit is more valuable, because it has the aether which is so adored by Modern Physics!

The quotation you refer to may be:

‘(1). The idea is nonsense.
(2). Somebody thought of it before you did.
(3). We believed it all the time.’

-Professor R.A. Lyttleton (quoted by Sir Fred Hoyle in ‘Home is Where the Wind Blows’ Oxford University Press, 1997, p154).

With clear conditions for withdrawal, every terrorist act or disruption is quite clearly delaying, not accelerating with withdrawal of troops that everyone wants. This seems like the perfect way to drastically reduce support for insurgents and others who are opposing Iraq’s progress toward stability.