... That said, if one wants to delve deep into this technology the read will entail something the size of a N.Y. telephone book!
Chris
Yes it would. And to think, James Clerk Maxwell figured it all out in 1873 and published equations explaining it all, from DC to Light. Of course Maxwell used
quaternions in his explanation, which are basically incomprehensible to ordinary mortals. So in 1881 Oliver Heaviside trashed all that and rewrote everything as four differential equations which we electrical engineering types today reverently refer to as "Maxwell's Equations." They were handed down by God according to one of my professors.
There is a cult-following of pseudo-science, which we will NOT discuss here, that claims that putting the quaternions back into Maxwell's electro-magnetic field theory will result in the discovery of all sorts of wonderful things currently unknown or unacknowledged by mainstream science. It would take a tall stack of N.Y. telephone size books to even begin to explore that, and it would probably be a total waste of time and effort. However, quaternions have been resurrected today and are being applied in all sorts of fields, including the calculations of orbital mechanics, thanks to modern digital computers. Read the Wikipedia article to get started down that path.