I think we should stop glorifying Heaviside for his short sighted view on the usage of quaternion for EM field that he considered it as unnecessary "evil" [1].

I think we should stop glorifying Heaviside for his short sighted view on the usage of quaternion for EM field that he considered it as unnecessary "evil" [1]. He then developed a crippled version of the unintuitive vector calculus, a mathematical hack that some people still considered it as the golden standard for doing EM calculations. IMHO by doing this and going against quaternion he has hindered much progress in EM for more than century since that's what being taught in textbook, and most people including EM engineers don't care to look what's available beyond the run-of-the-mill textbooks. There's a very famous saying by Einstein, make it simple but not simpler, and in this case Heaviside's "Vectors Versus Quaternions" paper and related advocacy has caused more harm than good to the math, science and engineering of EM based system by doing simpler than simpler (pardon the pun). I have also a hypothesis that perhaps someone can research into, if Einstein is exposed properly to quaternion based EM, and using it he would have solved the general theory of relativity much earlier than he took of 10 years after the special relativity discovery. The quaternion form of relativity has been even presented by L. Silberstein in 1908, just three years after the discovery of special relativity [3]. It is a shame that even today apparently the Wikipedia entry of both special relativity and general relativity do not even mentioned quaternion (zero, nada, zilch) as if it is a taboo to do so, perhaps partly thanks to Heaviside of his seemingly very successful propaganda even after more than century of progress in math, science and engineering. [1] Vectors Versus Quaternions (1893): https://www.nature.com/articles/047533c0 https://www.nature.com/articles/047533c0 [2] General relativity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity [3] Quaternionic Form of Relativity. L. Silberstein (1912) [PDF]: https://dougsweetser.github.io/Q/Stuff/pdfs/Silberstein-Relativity.pdf https://dougsweetser.github.io/Q/Stuff/pdfs/Silberstein-Rela...