Toward Complexity: Trends in Electromagnetic Wave Theory

Large scale computing has made it possible to study electromagnetic wave interaction with natural and manmade environments of substantial complexity, granting quantitative access to problems that could not be reached by purely analytical methods. This circumstance has stimulated debate within the academic, research and applicational communities concerning the role, if any, of analysis for dealing with complexity. If there is such a role, it must be toward furnishing physical insight into the wave phenomena, i.e. the "observables", which produce the numerically calculated signal. Some suggestions are made toward classifying complexity according to different scales in the configurational and spectral (i.e. phase space) domains. This requires intimate coupling of propagation phenomena and signal processing. As yet, there are more questions than answers, both technically and philosophically.