Talk:Ivor Catt/Archive 3

So what is this? To enable the continuity of electric current to be retained across a capacitor Maxwell proposed a "displacement current". By treating the capacitor as a special kind of transmission line this mathematical convenience is no longer required. Is this not a quote from the article? --Light current 03:00, 1 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Nigel Cook notes that Catt says this is unhelpful, that Ivall as editor wrote title and introduction to the Catt paper.

Do you have written evidence for this second hand hearsay? If so please quote then we can include it as fact not hearsay!--Light current 03:32, 1 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Displacement current does exist in all real situations if the insulator is anything but a vacuum, and in quantum electrodynamics there is displacement current in a vacuum.

Agreed for non vacuum. disagree DC--Light current 03:41, 1 January 2006 (UTC) for vacuum unless it has been measured. This idea is nor widely accepted (if at all)


 * Take any real capacitor with a plastic or even liquid "dielectric". This gets polarised in a real displacement current; ions try to move towards capacitor plates of opposite charge to themselves.

The question of dielctricaly loaded capacitors is not in question.--Light current 03:41, 1 January 2006 (UTC)


 * The only reason Catt eliminates displacement current is because he uses a model which ignores transverse energy flow in a vacuum.

There is no transverse energy flow in a vacuum. Energy is ExH in the well known direction.--Light current 03:41, 1 January 2006 (UTC)


 * If you don't have transverse energy flow, the middle of a Heaviside energy current (between the two conductors) would not be affected by the conductors, so it would continue straight on at an open circuit. That this doesn't happen is is not a point of view, but well established fact.

It doesnt carry on at the end of the conductors because theres no conductors in which to induce current or terminate E field lines and there is a step discontinuity in Zo (unless of course the TL impedance is near to 377 ohms). Then I suppose you may get some radiation. To get transmission in space, the em wave has to be matched to 377 ohms.--Light current 03:41, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

Quantum electrodynamics does have polarised vacuum and displacement current, although not the gear cogs and idler wheels or the elastic solid aether of Maxwell's model:

Has this been proven to exist by experiment?--Light current 03:41, 1 January 2006 (UTC)


 * ‘Some distinguished physicists maintain that modern theories no longer require an aether… I think all they mean is that, since we never have to do with space and aether separately, we can make one word serve for both, and the word they prefer is ‘space’.’ – A.S. Eddington, ‘New Pathways in Science’, v2, p39, 1935.


 * ‘… with the new theory of electrodynamics [vacuum filled with virtual particles] we are rather forced to have an aether.’ – Paul A. M. Dirac, ‘Is There an Aether?,’ Nature, v168, 1951, p906. (If you have a kid playing with magnets, how do you explain the pull and push forces felt through space? As ‘magic’?) See also Dirac’s paper in Proc. Roy. Soc. v.A209, 1951, p.291.


 * ‘It has been supposed that empty space has no physical properties but only geometrical properties. No such empty space without physical properties has ever been observed, and the assumption that it can exist is without justification. It is convenient to ignore the physical properties of space when discussing its geometrical properties, but this ought not to have resulted in the belief in the possibility of the existence of empty space having only geometrical properties... It has specific inductive capacity and magnetic permeability.’ - Professor H.A. Wilson, FRS, Modern Physics, Blackie & Son Ltd, London, 4th ed., 1959, p. 361.


 * ‘All charges are surrounded by ... virtual photons, which spend part of their existence dissociated into fermion-antifermion pairs. The virtual fermions with charges opposite to the bare charge will be, on average, closer to the bare charge than those virtual particles of like sign. Thus, at large distances, we observe a reduced bare charge due to this screening effect.’ – I. Levine, D. Koltick, et al., Physical Review Letters, v.78, 1997, no.3, p.424.


 * The last paper provides experimental evidence that the electron core is surrounded by a "displacement current" type polarisation of the fabric of space. The polarised vacuum shields the electric charge of the core of the electron, but when you smash electrons and positrons together at very high energy, you get proof for a higher electric charge for the electron, due to the collision partly breaking through the polarised shield.


 * I've changed the paragraph about displacement current to:

''However, the innovative part of the article is highly indicative and suggestive of stepwise charging of capacitors. Einstein claimed in 1905 to dismiss Maxwell's ether whose function it was to provide the medium for "displacement current" in light. So Catt's apparent claim to dismiss the need for "displacement current" and just have the mathematics remain was echoing Einstein. However, this whole discussion is irrevelant and bitterly controversial [4]. Catt has simply championed the Heaviside case of two conductors propagating a slab of energy current.''

It really would be helpful if you would identify yourself by typing 4 tildes (or clicking the signature button at the top of the edit box) at the end of your post. THis will give your URL and time, date (thats all ) and will halp us to see which input is by which person. Would you please consider doing that small thing on every post? Thank you!--Light current 02:52, 1 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I didn't notice that about signing for date and time! As for the Heaviside slab of energy current, I said the energy between the conductors, if nothing ever goes sideways, is not associated with the conductors.  Hence, energy flowing at light speed would continue straight on, and radio aerials would radiate in the direction that a Heaviside slab of energy goes (parallel to the aerial).  We know this is nonsense, the energy of radio waves is radiated perpendicular to the direction of Heaviside energy current in a radio transmitter aerial.


 * Your explanation is that the energy current between the conductors is reflected back because the electric field lines terminate in charges, which are stopped by the ending of the transmission line. This is exactly what I said: there is transverse communication.  It is curious that many people find it a good idea to explain phenomena by false causes.  I'm not disagreeing that Heaviside's treatment is a useful approximation, but he himself said:


 * "The prevalent idea of mathematical works is that you must understand the reason why first, before you proceed to practise. That is fudge and fiddlesticks. I know mathematical processes that I have used with success for a very long time, of which neither I nor anyone else understands the scholastic logic. I have grown into them, and so understand them that way."


 * This statement excuses not only Heaviside and Catt, but every other mathematician who has pontificated without a mechanism and been acclaimed by the media for explaining the phenomenon . I think it is a capital mistake for innovators to use their own names at a time in human history when intolerance is in fashion.  If you look at Euclid's Elements of Geometry you see that there are 15 books whereas the man wrote 13.  What happened is now very obvious.  Innovators during the mediaeval period had ideas of their own, and not wanting the abuse and sneers from trying to push them under their own names, added the 2 extra books (which are actually pathetic in content, but that is not the point!).  The way forward is probably via Wikipedia, using anonymous names.


 * However, there is still the argument of what the difference between a "point of view" and a "fact" is. User:Light current states somewhere: "if in doubt, delete".  This is similar to Dr Woit's viewpoint here:, where Woit says that the first line of defence against crackpots is to ignore them, while a commentator replied : "I’ve mentioned before that Hawking characterizes the standard model as “ugly and ad hoc,” and if it were not for the fact that he sits in Newton’s chair, and enjoys enormous prestige in the world of theoretical physics, he would certainly be labeled as a “crackpot.” "


 * The same commentator (not me) said in another comment : "One example is Ivor Catt’s anomaly. You would think that science has progressed way beyond elementary concepts such as those Oliver Heaviside wrestled with in stringing the Atlantic with telegraph cables. However, like the old farmer said, “It’s not what I didn’t know that done me in, it’s what I knowed that weren’t so!”"


 * ‘(1). The idea is nonsense. (2). Somebody thought of it before you did. (3). We believed it all the time.’ - Professor R.A. Lyttleton's summary of inexcusable censorship (quoted by Sir Fred Hoyle in ‘Home is Where the Wind Blows’ Oxford University Press, 1997, p154).


 * The problem here is of course that you get people like Boltzmann committing suicide when their ideas are suppressed (back in 1906, Boltzmann's atomic statistics were being dismissed as drivel without being read). Nigel Cook says that if you subtract the approximations, errors and gloss from Ivor Catt's work, and just consider the bare bones of the physics of the stepwise charging of a capacitor that is sufficient itself to revolutionise physics, because it starts introducing mechanisms into physics, which is terrible for mathematics.  String theory, saying "the universe is a mathematical 10 or 11 dimensional entity which does not have physical mechanisms" falls apart.  The political problem is that of convincing or failing to convince others.  Catt states that if a man climbs a mountain that has never been climbed before, but that event is not reported in any media because the media don't want to bother listening, the man has still done it.  Of course Wikipedia would require reports in the media, not the "crackpot" internet site filled with data and illustrations.


 * So Wikipedia, made too rigorously censored, will defeat its own objective of providing free speech. If it too weakly censored, it will be written off as "suspect".  You can't win unless you can "blind" people with the light of your argument straight off.

172.214.64.193 12:55, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

MA Cantab not worth the paper its written on
An MA (Cantab) (Latin: Magister Artium Cantabrigiensis) refers to a special kind of Masters degree awarded by the University of Cambridge six years after matriculation to a Bachelor's degree. For example, if one were to start their 3-year BA course, then they would be entitled to take up the title three years after graduation (assuming they paid the typically nominal fee). --Light current 04:28, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

Comments by Catt supporter (Nigel Cook probably)
Hi Light current! Hope you don't mind a brief comment (you can delete it easily). New Scientist editor Jeremy Webb at says: "Scientists have a duty to tell the public what they are doing...".

Unfortunately in practice, things can never be that neat. I took up Catt's case about a decade ago after reading his depressing letter in the May 1995 issue of Electronics World. It was headed up something like No Conspiracy by editor Martin Eccles. Catt began the letter by saying there is no conspiracy to suppress him, because an evolved conspiracy is adequate. He then went on about the Catt anomaly and finished up with the ether, saying that nobody in modern physics worries about the 377 ohm impediance of space.

I wrote to him, asking about the electron, and he replied "it is a standing TEM wave". How could it be confined? The only force which would do it was gravity. That meant an electron is like negative half-cycle of Maxwell's light ray, trapped in a loop by the gravitational field generated by its own energy. The size of a black hole is 2GM/c^2, which turned out to be far smaller for an electron than the Planck size, which is assumed by string theorists.

At some point, Catt turned against me, probably because he wanted to build everything from a Heaviside slab of energy, in which you never have to worry about one charge by itself; you always have at least two charges, one positive and one negative.

The way to think is like this. Start with Catt's charged capacitor (contrapuntal model).

Chop it in half, and repeat this until you have cut the plates down to single charges, an electron where the negative plate was and a proton where the positive plate was. (This is a bit like the original Greek thinking behind the atomic theory!)

You then see that the energy of the charge is itself going at light speed. So it is spinning at that speed. If you look at the Electronics World illustration here: you see a picture of the Heaviside electromagnetic wave (Heaviside-Poynting vector, as they both discovered it independently) going in a loop.

The way the fields add up, you get a dipole magnetic moment (as exists for electrons!) and a radial electric field (also a fact!). You also get spin. Problem is, everybody claims it can't be done! You can't get a pictorial model for an electron, they say, because "nobody understands quantum mechanics". Another, more simplified, version of that picture is here:. This is simpler, but also includes a picture of the polarised ether (whoops, I mean spacetime fabric) around the electron core. (This is a standard quantum electrodynamics result.)

What is happening is that there is a unified force field near the core of any charged particle, which is about 137 times the strength of Coulomb's law. This strong force is the short-ranged strong nuclear force. It can be calculated easily from quantum theory (the problem in quantum field theory is explaining why Coulomb's force is 137 times weaker, which is why they have the polarised vacuum shielding the core, although there are numerous arguments about the basics, I'm sticking to the facts I've found empirical evidence for).

My message in conclusion is that (1) existing physics is more or less O.K. as it stands and (2) unified field theory is a very simple fitting together of the physical facts obtained from existing mathematical theories including general relativity and quantum theory.

It is weird that this conclusion, that existing ideas fitted together do explain everything in a simple way, is seen as crackpot. The heated abuse which is thrown at an innovator, reached a peak around October 2003, when Cook got a final calculation published relating the strength of gravity to existing accepted facts in physics. Cook put a post on "Physics Forums" hoping for discussion with people interested in it. Instead, the only comments came from people trying to dismiss it without having gone into the details. Politely asking people not to comment on what they had not read just made people reply "why bother reading rubbish?" and the moderator closed the disscussion. Cook then made the error of writing about the fascist attitudes in burning books they had not read, which led to the moderator attacking Cook as a fascist and claiming the whole idea is crank, and closing the thread. Cook was then banned from making any further comments or starting any more discussions, even to answer the moderator's misconceptions!

The moderator's names were "Anticrank" and such like, so they were very brave in putting their reputations on the line to defend knowledge against Cook. Anyway, in May 1995 when I read Catt's letter Cook was a 23 year old who was certain Catt had simply made an error in presenting the material, by being too political and not including up to date material. See here for Cook's own comment on his own suppression on Peter Woit's blog at Columbia University: and see here for Woit's response: !!!!!!

Woit says: "I’m tempted to delete the previous comment, but am leaving it since I think that, if accurate, it is interesting to see that the editor of PRL is resorting to an indefensible argument in dealing with nonsense submitted to him (although the “…” may hide a more defensible argument). Please discuss this with the author of this comment on his weblog, not here. I’ll be deleting any further comments about this."

The kind of paper suppressed by PRL, Nature, arXiv.org, etc., is that Cook submitted while at U. of Glos.:. Updated version:.

Notice also that on Woit's blog there are comments from other people suppressed for contradicting string theory, which falsely claims to explain gravity. See Peter Woit entry on Wikipedia for the appropriate response to that. String theory doesn't do anything, it predicts nothing, and science is about facts, not untestable speculation.

Conclusion: it is impossible to do anything meaningful for Catt's work or to say anything meaningful. The culture of the world today is to shoot first, ask questions later!!!!!

Happy New Year anyway! :-) - &mdash;The preceding unsigned comment was added by 172.201.169.226 (talk &bull; contribs).


 * If thats brief, please dont send me a long comment!! --Light current 04:05, 1 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Also it would help if you would state categorically that you are NOT Nigel Cook nor Ivor Catt. Would you do that for us please?--Light current 04:12, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, I had been drinking! (I'm not Ivor Catt, maybe the other guy). 172.214.64.193 13:08, 1 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Ok Nigel. Im reassuming its you again. No need to be shy. I assume you also removed yourself from the page as one of Catts supporters which is OK if you are not now supporting him.


 * As I mentioned before, we have to have unbiased, NPOV material on all pages and cannot digress into things that are not relevant to the page title. We as editors have no axes to grind (usually) but we also have to ensure that other people do not grind theirs here! I am sure you understand our position. Please contribute as you wish to the page, but please do not be offended if your work is edited and trimmed to meet the fairly strict requirements of Wikipedia. Remember, all we are trying to do is report the sustainable facts about Ivor Catt.--Light current 15:56, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

An observation on charging a transmission line
I see that this is where Nigel Cook is posting these days. He appears to have abandoned his blog - the only comments he's had on it have been mine, picking holes in his maths and his physics. I tried the following on him (but he changed the subject rapidly...)

Start with the interminable Catt et al charging up of a open-ended transmission line through a resistance. However, rather than making the resistance much larger than the line's characteristic impedance, make it exactly equal to the impedance. Clearly the outbound voltage step will be half the supply voltage, and the "reflection" from the open end will be equal to the supply voltage. Furthermore, because the input end is "properly terminated", the reflection will run into the source resistance and "disappear".

Now consider the current flowing through the source resistance. Of course, no current flows until the supply voltage is applied. While the voltage edge is travelling out and back, half the supply voltage is "dropped" across the resistance and a current flows. The voltage is constant during this time, so the current is also. However, once the "reflection" has arrived back at the "source end", the voltage at the transmission line end of the resistance is now equal to the supply voltage. There is no voltage difference across the resistance, so current ceases to flow.

It should be clear that current flows from the supply in one direction only, and for a fixed period of time.

Now replace the source resistance with a further identical length of transmission line. It ought to be obvious that this makes absolutely no difference to the flow of current at the "point of join", and that the argument can be extended to apply at any point on the transmission line.

Current flows at any point on the transmission line in one direction only and only during the period between the "outbound" wave front and the return of its reflection.

We have current, voltage and time, so we can calculate the amount of electrical energy that flows through any point on the transmission line. For a positive supply voltage, the voltage at any point is always positive, and the current is always positive or zero, so the flow of energy is in one direction only.

This is in direct contradiction to Catt's assertion that the energy is in phase with the voltage edge and is reflected off the open end.
 * I think energy is only in phase with the voltage edge when the voltage edge is travelling away from the source, not when coming back toward the source!--Light current 03:13, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

I agree with you. We both disagree with Catt. -- Kevin Brunt 13:59, 5 January 2006 (UTC) Basically, Catt et al used the "derived" equations that describe the transmission line in terms of voltage, impedance and characteristic velocity, rather than starting from scratch with the "Telegrapher's Equations", which describe the voltage and current at any point on the transmission line. (In fact, on page 10/11 of their book "Digital Hardware Design", they explicitly reject the derivation of the behaviour of the TL as a sequence of LC sections. Their justification for this strongly suggests that they never bothered to do the proper research. They claim that there is a "spurious" high frequency cutoff. The cutoff does, in fact, exist - it's due to the finite resistance of the conductor, and is the reason why Heaviside advocated the deliberate addition of inductance to telegraph cables to increase the maximum transmission rate. This is somewhat ironic, since Catt has since used Heaviside's quarrel with Preece on the subject with Catt's own disputes with the "establishment.)

Kevin Brunt 00:36, 5 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Does Catt say energy is refelected off the open end. Or does he say voltage is reflected off the open end. They are not the same!--Light current 02:13, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

What Catt actually says (his "Electromagnetism" book, chapter 1) is "all of the energy travelling to the right at the speed of light is reflected and begins the return journey to the left." At this point he appears to have made two assumptions; firstly that the electric and magnetic fields around the conductor are "TEM" and secondly that the whole of the transmitted energy is held in those fields. He has, in fact, not even tried to demonstrate either. In fact, since the magnetic field is due to the flow of current in the conductor, it can't be pure "TEM", because TEM is, by definition, due to the "displacement current" term in the Ampere-Maxwell equation. -- Kevin Brunt 13:59, 5 January 2006 (UTC)


 * I concur that Catt appears only to deal with TEM waves. Is that a problem? If the energy is not wholly contained in these fields, where else is it contained in the travelling wave?
 * Whilst the line is charging, energy is certainly being fed into the line. This energy flow continues until the reflected voltage wave has reached the source end of the line again. At this point, the line is fully charged and no more energy can enter it. This is easy to see. However, whether energy starts to flow backwards at the instant of voltage reflection, I'm not sure about. I think it continues to flow in the original direction adding to the stored energy already there by raising the voltage on the line to double what it was, so the increase in energy is flowing backwards if you like, whilst the energy is still flowing forwards. I dont think there's too much of a problem here! To be honset, I think it can be thought of either way!.
 * I think energy is continuously reflected off the ends once the line is fully charged but this depends whether you believe there are two counter propagating waves existing when the line has fully charged.--Light current 02:32, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

This, actually, is the crux of the problem! If you fire a "square" pulse into an open-ended transmission line, you will get the pulse reflected back. At the moment when the reflected leading edge coincides with the outward trailing edge, you get a half-width, double-voltage pulse "transient state". The "standard description" says that at this moment the "motion" has come to a stop (no current, no energy flow) and that the energy is held entirely in the capacitance. In terms of "Heaviside energy slabs", you could say that the slab behaves as if it were made of rubber and bounces, the kinetic energy being used to compress the "spring" of the "rubber" and converted back into the kinetic energy of the motion in the reverse direction.

Catt on the other hand thinks that the reversal of motion occurs as the edge arrives at the open end, so that the current is in phase with the voltage. Catt Electromagnetics Ch 1 At the "half-width" point, he has equal and opposite current flows. Because he argues that these current flows have associated energy, he has to assert that the equation for the energy stored in a capacitor ("half C V squared") is wrong!

The charged capacitor is effectively where the "half-width" transient state is sustained. Catt is basically arguing that these opposing currents exist, even though they can't be observed. He has to assume that some of the effects of current flow are cancelled out while others are not. Thus the magnetic fields cancel out, but the energy stored in them does not and the loss of energy into the resistance magically vanishes (even though the loss of energy is "in the same direction" regardless of the direction of current!) I can see definite parallels with the story of Phlogiston. -- Kevin Brunt 15:15, 6 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Whether TEM is due to displacement current is a moot point. Has anyone ever measured this current (not the mag field). Catt denies the existence of vacuum displacement current.--Light current 00:32, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

Measure the electric field at regular intervals, plot the captured values on a graph and fit a smooth curve to the points. The slope of the line at any point of the curve is directly related to the displacement current. (You will, of course, need 4-dimensional graph paper for some of the more complicated cases...)


 * Slope of line may indicate a current, but does a current exist, or just a mag field??--Light current 23:40, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

Physicists use the term "transverse electromagnetic wave" to refer to a specific situation, namely that of a self-sustaining wave in free space with the electric and magnetic fields at right angles, moving at the "speed of light" at right angles to both. Catt is dealing with a battery connected to a piece of wire and the fact that the wire is a transmission line should not be allowed to obscure the fact that there is current flow in the conductor. This means that by definition the situation is not merely "TEM".

Catt is misusing the vocabulary of physics. The whole of the muddle that he has created could have been avoided "at a stroke" by employing a physics teacher of the old school to deliver a sharp rap across the knuckles with a ruler every time he used a scientific term incorrectly!


 * Well I for one try to keep an open mind on this subject. Raps across the knuckles for speaking ones mind tend to hinder progress you'll find!.--Light current 23:43, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

I have no object to Catt "speaking his mind". I have every objection to his shoddy science and particularly to his claims of "censorship" whenever anyone tries to point out his mistakes. -- Kevin Brunt 19:23, 8 January 2006 (UTC)


 * We on WP are not trying to come down on one side or the other. Whether people believe in Catts ideas is up to them. All we are trying to do on this page is present his ideas and adventures in a neutral way.--Light current 23:16, 8 January 2006 (UTC)