Talk:Ivor Catt/Archive 15

Another DAY!
..... another archive file!

While the necessity for charge in Maxwell's Equations is interesting, I feel that it is not entirely helpful when discussing Catt's theories, because he really doesn't believe in either concept!

It might be more useful to ask the perhaps more fundamental question "What is charge?" One answer is that it comes from the equation It = CV, which is more than simply the definition of a capacitor, because what it does is tie together "static electricity" and "current electricity". In fact, this is only the simple form of the equation with the calculus left out. The full form is in terms of the integral of current against time and the integral of the CV term over the surface of the capacitor. In this latter form the equation is true no matter how the charge is distributed over the surface (or indeed how it is changing with time.)

This points to a major problem with the Dec78 Catt et al article, which fails to acknowledge that "Q=CV" is merely a simplified equation that gives an very good approximation for most of the things that electrical engineers want to do. The full description turns into a major exercise in calculus, requiring detailed knowledge of the structure of the capacitor, and which might be of theoretical interest to a physicist, but is merely a waste of time to an engineer designing a circuit.

And from here we can see a basic error in the article. The description of a transmission line in terms of the impedances at its ends and the transit time of a voltage waveform from end to end might not explicitly mention charge, but it also cannot answer the question "Why is there voltage on the line at all?" And the answer is, of course, that the voltage at any point along the TL is a measure of how much charge is present there! The article avoids the concept of charge entirely because it uses a set of equations which have eliminated charge by replacing Q with CV throughout, and then replacing C with ε/f to conceal the substitution. -- Kevin Brunt 21:29, 24 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Im going to have to think about this over a (few) pint(s) of amber nectar. Afterwards, I probably wont care either way!--Light current 00:29, 25 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Come back Nigel -- All is forgiven (I cant handle Kevin on my own!)--Light current 00:35, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

I really can't see why I need to be "handled". All I'm doing is pointing out problems in Catt's theorising. It's something that ought to have been done before ever he got published in Wireless World. I know that he keeps on complaining about peer-review being "censorship", but all scientific work has to go through the process (indeed, all academic work) - it's no co-incidence that a successful PhD candidate will have "defended" his thesis against a rigorous oral cross-examination by a panel chosen for their competent in the field of study. Catt's work, I'm afraid, does not stand up to this sort of vigorous questioning. -- Kevin Brunt 20:38, 25 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I mean your output is so voluminous that I cant reply to it all myselF :-)--Light current 20:42, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Unfortunately, it takes a lot more words to establish a valid statement of fact from first principles by the accepted methods of science than it does by the unsupported assertion method that Catt prefers, (which is closely allied to the biblical "fetch the tablets of stone from up the mountain" method.) -- Kevin Brunt 23:14, 26 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I dont understand he last post :-? --Light current 23:34, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, it was a bit rushed. If you look at Catt's various articles, you will find that many of them are constructed around assertions that are, to say the least, debatable. Thus in the "Displacement Current" article, the absence of displacement current is asserted, rather than proved. In fact, the assertion is presented without any pertinent discussion. It can only be conjectured that Catt & Co think that it follows from the assertion that the charging of a TL can be explained without the concept of charge, which in turn is founded on the assertion that a TL is a capacitor. We've spent quite a bit of time recently discussing the deficiencies in this chain of reasoning.

Then there is the March 1980 Wireless World article which claims that all mathematicians since Newton have been wrong about the calculus relationship da/db.db/dc = da/dc, in that there is a missing minus sign and that this somehow proves that Maxwell's Equations are wrong. Catt's argument is based on the assertion "Now we regard the velocity of the train dx/dt as positive." A detailed analysis reveals that in the context of Catt's scenario, dx/dt is actually negative, and that Catt has made an elementary error; In fact, he failed to do the proper analysis himself and has totally screwed up his co-ordinate systems.

In both cases, as in others, Catt presents an unsubstantiated assertion as fact. He needs no more than a single sentence to do so. The proper analysis requires a lot more words. -- Kevin Brunt 18:50, 27 April 2006 (UTC)


 * "All I'm doing is pointing out problems in Catt's theorising. It's something that ought to have been done before ever he got published in Wireless World. I know that he keeps on complaining about peer-review being "censorship", but all scientific work has to go through the process (indeed, all academic work) - it's no co-incidence that a successful PhD candidate will have "defended" his thesis against a rigorous oral cross-examination by a panel chosen for their competent in the field of study. Catt's work, I'm afraid, does not stand up to this sort of vigorous questioning." - Kevin.

Nigel's resurfacing
Kevin, that was my first reaction: blame Catt's editors. The late Tom Ivall was the overall Wireless World editor during the 1980s, and Martin Eccles was technical editor. Martin later became the overall editor for a decade. Tom was interested in publishing Catt as a controversy piece, while Martin was less keen but published a few of Catt's less political letters.

What you have to remember is that - assuming Catt to be right - you are dealing with a scientific revolutionary. Imagine how difficult it would have been to do objective editing to Kepler's multivolume treatise of technical data back in 1609. Kepler, just like Catt, mixed up genuine advances with mysticism. In Catt's case the mysticism is the holy trinity of three vectors in the Poynting-Heaviside electromagnetic energy current. In Kepler's time, he had mysticism treating the solar system binding force as magnetism, and having the musical harmony of the orbits, etc. There was an enormous amount of rubbish in there. Newton would have been given short shrift by Kepler (assuming Kepler to have had the personality of Catt). Catt complains loudly if you identify facts in his work, claiming his ideas should not be "partitioned". He believes science is personality based, not fact based.

When I tried to identify solid facts in Catt's work and discuss them, he would shout me down and start talking of his friend, Professor Dr Harold Hillman's, suppression. Hillman, biologist at Surrey University in the 1980s, "discovered" that when you place a sample in an electron microscope, it is perturbed by the effects of vacuum and electron radiation, etc. So the results of the analysis are corrupted more than for the usual dying of a specimen magnified under a slide in an ordinary optical microscope. Hillman then goes on to suggest the implication that nobody should trust results from electron microscopes. Then he gets "suppressed". Catt finds this exciting, and it is very similar to what Catt is doing with the "Catt anomaly/question ". Of course the establishment can't use Hillman or Catt's objections constructively. Science proceeds not by whinging criticisms of orthodoxy, but by advances.

Personally, I've never had any freedom of speech in my life, so I don't appreciate Catt's talk of this kind. I keep my statements tied to hard facts and still have problems making anybody listen to anything. This isn't due to the size of the world's population since the ratio of media to suppressed people remains roughly constant (both groups have grown in size over the last century). Catt seems to think suppression of something new proves we are now finally at the "end of the enlightenment," whatever that is supposed to mean. This is a falsehood: Boltzmann killed himself in 1906 due to suppression: "In 1904 Boltzmann visited the World's Fair in St Louis, USA. He lectured on applied mathematics and then went on to visit Berkeley and Stanford. Unfortunately he failed to realise that the new discoveries concerning radiation that he learnt about on this visit were about to prove his theories correct.  Attacks on his work continued and he began to feel that his life's work was about to collapse despite his defence of his theories. Depressed and in bad health, Boltzmann committed suicide just before experiment verified his work. On holiday with his wife and daughter at the Bay of Duino near Trieste, he hanged himself while his wife and daughter were swimming. However the cause of his suicide may have been wrongly attributed to the lack of acceptance of his ideas. We will never know the real cause which may have been the result of mental illness causing his depression."

In fact, every radical advance is always suppressed, by definition of the word radical. The only advances not suppressed are non-radical. Quarks were radical, so Zweig's paper was suppressed and rejected, and Gell-Mann only published his paper in a European journal, not a major American one. General relativity was NOT radical, nor was special relativity or quantum mechanics. These were mainstream developments; Poincare, Lorentz and Larmor all published on special relativity equations before Einstein, also without suppression. So Einstein was not one-man revolutionary, contrary to widespread perceptions. Boltzmann was such a revolutionary, and paid the price by being attacked.

I think I was wrong to blame Tom Ivall and Martin Eccles for not editing more common sense into Catt's papers, and taking out error. Physics is not an easy subject, and these editors have families and lots of other responsibilities than spending months on a single paper, just to be "rewarded" by some anger from Catt. Far better to publish Catt unedited as a mess, or to reject him, than to try to improve it. Then of course you are talking personalities, not science. For all the political problems with say Nature or Physical Review Letters, at least they manage to publich some decent papers. Ultimately, when the little people have clarified Catt's ideas, someone great in the mainstream may see it worth his or her while ($$££) to write a "professional" paper on the topic and try to get it into Nature or PRL to win a prize. The various people already studying these things will be said to have been incompetent amateurs.

Catt is really in a position of say Rutherford when he had the first evidence for the nuclear atom i.e., evidence saying that the mainstream plum-pudding atom of Sir J.J. Thomson was wrong. Rutherford did a lot of hard work to analyse the alpha particle scattering by gold foil, providing strong evidence for a small charged nucleus. Catt however has not done the equivalent hard analysis (see ). Catt is this month (on 26/28 May) celebrating 30 years of suppression of his major discovery. But is it suppressed? It has been published widely in Wireless World and on the internet. It is not like the suppresson of Galileo. Nobody in the "Establishment" understands what Catt is saying, apart from his silly insults and political type comments which are made by lots of people who don't understand maths. So Catt is not in an analogous position to Galileo. Also, Catt is not interested in physics much, and seems incompetent.

You can't discuss with Catt because when you mention either energy or momentum he interrupts and he says things like "it is weird that physics has BOTH momentum AND energy". You then explain to Catt that both energy and momentum are conserved quantities, so they are not mathematical obfuscations or duplicating each other. Then you have run out of time, and when you next see Catt he says the same problem again, which you explained before. Clearly I'm not cut out to teach people about conservation principles, at least not people like Catt. I'm also happy with causal momentum, a spacetime fabric filling space and flowing around moving fundamental particles once you have put work in to overcome inertia and accelerate them to a given velocity. I'm not so locked into empirical principles that I refuse to search for a mechanism. Anyway, you cannot discuss physics with Catt. Nigel 172.215.83.97 17:19, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Kevin's Response
The most relevant part of a comparison between Ivor Catt and Ernest Rutherford is to note differences. Rutherford performed a series of experiments which yielded results that were inexplicable within the prevailing theories and he then came up with a new model that more nearly matched the observations. His model was eventually superceded because further experiments showed that Rutherford's work was not the last word on the subject.


 * No! Nuclear physics hasn't been superseded!  Also, Rutherford did mathematics, not the crucial experiments, which were done by Geiger and Marsden.  Rutherford's nuclear atom has never been superseded.  As a chemist perhaps you are thinking of Bohr-Sommerfeld atom, developed about 3 years after Rutherford's nuclear atom calculations?  Rutherford got the credit for the nuclear atom not for experiments but for carefully analysing the results and getting the paper past bigoted pro-Thomson (pro-plum pudding atoms, anti-nuclear atoms) referees!  I've recently been moving my interest from experiments to theory, because results of experiments don't speak for themselves.  You need to be a theorist to get them published, or you need a good theorist in your team. Hans Geiger, the experimentalist who got his hands dirty in the lab and actually got the nuclear atom evidence, is only remembered for his radioactivity counter nowadays.  Also, the Japanese had arguments about a nuclear atom as early as 1903, but nobody listened.  So they didn't get the Nobel Prize.  nigel 172.214.68.193 18:33, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

On the other hand, Catt's theorising is based entirely on the results of a single theoretical analysis of a voltage step in a transmission line. His "results" consist only of an alternative model where current flow is replaced by some sort of "EM wave", the mathematics of which he has fiddled so that he gets the same answers as the "standard theory" gives. He has proposed no experiment for which his theory would predict a different result to that yielded by the standard one (which means that there is no way to distinguish between the theories) and he has not done any of the work needed to extend his theory to explain other situations. Instead, his "research" appears to consist of reading physics texts looking for passages which can be made to appear to support his position when quoted out of context.

Consider his claim that Maxwell thought that the charge on a capacitor is instantly spread across the plate. Nigel repeats this claim in the blob article he referenced above.

It is worth looking at Nigel's argument in some detail. Firstly, he derives the equation " i = dD/dt " from an analysis of Catt's voltage-step-on-a-transmission-line scenario. "i" is the current flowing in the conductor and "dD/dt" is the displacement current. Nigel has, in fact, made an important mistake here, because if he had got his conventions for the direction of current flow consistent he would have seen that if the current in the conductor is flowing towards the voltage step, the displacement current is flowing away from it. The two quantities are thus of opposite sign and Nigel should properly have written "i = - dD/dt", which rearranged into a form which makes more physical sense "i + dD/dt = 0". It would have been better if Nigel had used "dQ/dt" rather than "i" as what he really is talking about is not a current per se, but rather the sum of the currents flowing into or out of a "point" (ie the total that Kirchoff's Current Law says must be zero.) This actually gives us a definition of what "displacement current" is, which is that it is the additional term that is needed to allow Kirchoff's Law to be applied to to a capacitor.


 * Conventional current (electric current) is defined as flowing the opposite way to electric drift flow, after Benjamin Franklin. Don't worry too much about which way the displacement current is physically going, as it is not real charge anyway.  nigel 172.214.68.193 18:42, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

This is a way that Maxwell could have got to displacement current in the first place. If you start from the premise that charge can accumulate somewhere you have to add the extra term to Kirchoff's Law. This extra term is somehow related to the amount of charge that has accumulated, and the obvious next step is to relate the accumulated charge to the capacitance that it is accumulating in. And this is where Catt's quoting-out-of-context comes in, because clearly what Maxwell did was to make the mathematics easier by pretending that the charge was evenly spread across the plates and that the field between the plates was completely even and didn't spread beyond the edges.

Now the important point is that Maxwell was not claiming that this would ever happen in reality. It was merely a theoretically possible situation for which the calculation was particularly easy, since it does not require a detailed analysis of how the charge spreads across the surface, which would have been time-consuming and difficult to get right, and which would have obscured the result that Maxwell was working to. The only question is whether the proof that the total field between the plates of a capacitor is dependent only on the charge and not on it distribution already existed, or whether Maxwell had to work it out himself in order to complete his analysis.

Basically, this shows the distinction between "science" and "engineering". Maxwell, as a scientist, is interested in the principles of what is happening; the details of "reality" are additional clutter which make understanding what's going on more difficult. Catt, the engineer, is interested in what happens in a specific scenario, but not necessarily why it happens. -- Kevin Brunt 22:24, 10 May 2006 (UTC)


 * The time-dependent Schrodinger to Maxwell’s displacement current i = dD/dt. The former is just a quantized complex version of the latter. Treat the Hamiltonian as a regular quantity as Heaviside showed you can do for many operators. Then the solution to the time dependent Schroedinger equation is: wavefunction at time t after initial time = initial wavefunction.exp(-iHt/[h bar]). This is an general analogy to the exponential capacitor charging you get from displacement current.  Maxwell’s displacement curent is i = dD/dt where D is product of electric field (v/m) and permittivity. Because the current flowing into the first capacitor plate falls off exponentially as it charges up, there is radio transmission transversely like radio from an antenna (radio power is proportional to the rate of charge of current in the antenna, which can be a capacitor plate).  Hence the reality of displacement current is radio transmission. As each plate of a circuit capacitor acquires equal and opposite charge simultaneously, the radio transmission from each plate is an inversion of that from the other, so the superimposed signal strength away from the capacitor is zero at all times. Hence radio losslessly performs the role of induction which Maxwell attributed to aetherial displacement current.  Schroedinger’s time-dependent equation says the product of the hamiltonian and wavefunction equals i[h bar].d[wavefunction]/dt, which is a general analogy to Maxwell’s i = dD/dt.  It’s weird that people seem prejudiced against the reconciliation of classical and quantum electrodynamics. The Dirac equation is a relativized form of Schroedinger's equation. Why doesn’t anybody take the analogy of displacement current seriously? nigel 172.214.68.193 18:46, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Consenus?
Are we near to reaching any consensus on Catts views-- or not?--Light current 00:39, 11 May 2006 (UTC)


 * I'm afraid that I'd put the probability of achieving consensus as vanishingly small. My position is that whenever Catt'd ideas diverge from "standard theory", it is Catt that is wrong. My belief is that Catt simply does not fully understand what the "standard theory" actually says in the first place, and that one of the primary reasons for this is that he cannot (or will not) use the partial differential equations which "Science" uses as the most general way of expressing many physical processes. Instead, Catt takes his science from the simplified, calculus-free forms found in beginners' textbooks, and then complains about the issues that the simplification can't address. -- Kevin Brunt 20:21, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

I didnt say consensus with Catts views. I said are you and Nigel reaching any consensus ON Catts views at all?. And does Nigel not agree with anything you have to say on Catt?--Light current 21:53, 11 May 2006 (UTC)


 * LC, the answer to your question lies in this quote of Nigel's.
 * In other words, Maxwell treats wire electricity as being different to the current flow in the vacuum dielectric of a charging or discharging capacitor, whereas Catt. Davidson, and Walton have proven that there is no distinction for pulses of electromagnetic energy in wires. Hence, Maxwell is mathematically wrong.
 * It's from the blog article that Nigel quoted before, which in turn is quoting one of Nigel's web pages... Nigel says that it's the consequence of his 'i = dD/dt' equation. As I said, Nigel has got the sign of the dD/dt term backwards; correcting this blows Nigel's argument out of the water, as it restores the '+' sign that Nigel claims is an error on Maxwell's part. I, of course, hold that the electric and magnetic fields surrounding a conductor carrying a current are intimately bound to the motion of charge in the conductor, and that this differs in important ways from an electromagnetic wave propagating in free space. In this I am diametrically opposed to Nigel's position.


 * NB A large part of the confusion surrounding Catt's writing on the subject (including the "Anomaly") is that it obscures a very important point; namely, that if charge in motion results in the creation of electric and magnetic fields, the converse is also true - electric and magnetic fields can cause motion of charge. However, in "real physics", rather than Catt's version, electromagnetic waves in free space are necessarily oscillatory, so the motion that they impart to the charge in a conductor is also oscillatory. Of course, if you set out to generate an sustained electromagnetic wave you would have to make the current in your conductor oscillate.... -- Kevin Brunt 23:18, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

OK then. Would it be possible for you and Nigel to agree on SOME common ground (however small) that could be put in the article. After all, thats what this talk page is intended for! I feel you two should start now to work toward some mutually acceptable statements if this discuusion is to have any benefit to the article! 8-)--Light current 23:36, 12 May 2006 (UTC)