Talk:Ivor Catt/Archive 8

Displacement current
Nigel. Maxwell's Aether theories and his interpretation of displacement current as a movement in the Aether were relegated to history by Michelson and Morley. He didn't know the "nature of electricity" because he died two decades before the discovery of the negatively-charged sub-atomic particle that we call the electron. If memory serves, Maxwell's "electron" was a vortex in the Aether. And "vector calculus" evolved because Maxwell, and other physicists, were finding problems that needed it. You are looking at Maxwell's work out of context. -- Kevin Brunt 21:40, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

For all of Catt's assertions, Maxwell's Equations work. The fact that in a "real" capacitor it takes a finite length of time for charge to spread across the plates does not invalidate displacement current; it just means that you have to work out in detail what the charge is doing at each point on the surface of the plate and then integrate across the surface. At which point you'll find that the total comes out the same as if you had just assumed that the charge was uniformly spread across the surface. Because that is what the Ampere-Maxwell Equation implies - if you enclose a volume of space, the net flow of "true electric current" into (or out of) the volume must be zero. When the amount of charge leaving is not equal to that entering there must be a balancing "displacement current", which means that the electric field passing through the boundary of the enclosed volume must be changing. The speed of propagation is irrelevant - it merely limits where the field can be changing in relation to the flow of charge. -- Kevin Brunt 21:40, 18 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Kevin, the equations are simply rough approximations which omit mechanism (QFT). The normal "Maxwell" equations are only valid at low energy, and are wrong at high energy when Gauss' law (the Maxwell equation for div.E) shows a stronger electron charge.


 * Physically, Coulomb's law and Gauss' law come from the SU(2)xU(1) portion of the Standard Model, the break down of electroweak theory by the way the vacuum rapidly attenuates the gauge bosons of weak forces (W and Z) over short ranges at low energy, but merely shields the electromagnetic force gauge boson (photon) by a factor of 1/137 at low energy, and


 * "... we find that the electromagnetic coupling grows with energy. This can be explained heuristically by remembering that the effect of the polarization of the vacuum ... amounts to the creation of a plethora of electron-positron pairs around the location of the charge. These virtual pairs behave as dipoles that, as in a dielectric medium, tend to screen this charge, decreasing its value at long distances (i.e. lower energies)." - arxiv hep-th/0510040, p 71.


 * So it is false to say Maxwell's equations are correct. You have to include the Standard Model to allow for what happens in particle accelerators when particles are fired together at high energy.  The physical model above does give a correct interpretation of QFT and is also used in many good books (including Penrose's Road to Reality).  However as stated, the vacuum particles look different to observers in different states of motion, violating the postulate of Special/Restricted relativity (which is wrong anyway for the twins paradox, i.e., for ignoring all accelerating motions and spacetime curvature).  This is why it is a bit heretical.  Nevertheless it is confirmed by Koltick's experiments in 1997, published in PRL.


 * ‘All charges are surrounded by clouds of 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.


 * Koltick found a 7% increase in the strength of Coulomb's/Gauss' force field law when hitting colliding electrons at an energy of 80 GeV or so. The coupling constant for electromagnetism is 1/137 at low energies but was found to be 1/128.5 at 80 GeV or so.  This rise is due to the polarised vacuum being broken through.  We have to understand Maxwell's equations in terms of the gauge boson exchange process for causing forces and the polarised vacuum shielding process for unifying forces into a unified force at very high energy.


 * Heisenberg's uncertainty says


 * pd = h/(2.Pi)


 * where p is uncertainty in momentum, d is uncertainty in distance.
 * This comes from his imaginary gamma ray microscope, and is usually written as a minimum (instead of with "=" as above), since there will be other sources of uncertainty in the measurement process.


 * For light wave momentum p = mc,
 * pd = (mc)(ct) = Et where E is uncertainty in energy (E=mc2), and t is uncertainty in time.


 * Hence, Et = h/(2.Pi)


 * t = h/(2.Pi.E)


 * d/c = h/(2.Pi.E)


 * d = hc/(2.Pi.E)


 * This result is used to show that a 80 GeV energy W or Z gauge boson will have a range of 10^-17 m. So it's OK.


 * Now, E = Fd implies


 * d = hc/(2.Pi.E) = hc/(2.Pi.Fd)


 * Hence


 * F = hc/(2.Pi.d^2)


 * This force is 137.036 times higher than Coulomb's law for unit fundamental charges.
 * Notice that in the last sentence I've suddenly gone from thinking of d as an uncertainty in distance, to thinking of it as actual distance between two charges; but the gauge boson has to go that distance to cause the force anyway.
 * Clearly what's physically happening is that the true force is 137.036 times Coulomb's law, so the real charge is 137.036. This is reduced by the correction factor 1/137.036 because most of the charge is screened out by polarised charges in the vacuum around the electron core
 * The unified Standard Model force is F = hc/(2.Pi.d^2)


 * That's the superforce at very high energies, in nuclear physics. At lower energies it is shielded by the factor 137.036 for photon gauge bosons in electromagnetism, or by exp(-d/x) for vacuum attenuation by short-ranged nuclear particles, where x = hc/(2.Pi.E)


 * This is dealt with on my page . All the detailed calculations of the Standard Model are really modelling are the vacuum processes for different types of virtual particles and gauge bosons. The whole mainstream way of thinking about the Standard Model is related to energy . What is really happening is that at higher energies you knock particles together harder, so their protective shield of polarised vacuum particles gets partially breached, and you can experience a stronger force mediated by different particles!


 * As proved, the physical nature of "displacement current" is gauge boson/radio wave energy exchange in the Catt anomaly, . Catt has no idea what the Standard Model or general relativity are about, but that is what his work can be used to understand, by getting to grips with what "displacement current" really is (radio) as distinct from the fantasy Maxwell developed in which "displacement current" is not radio but is involved in radio together with Faraday's law, both acting at 90 degrees to the direction of propagation of radio.  Maxwell's light is a complete fantasy that has been justified by a falsified history Maxwell and Hertz invented.  Nigel 172.189.221.111 22:10, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

Nigel, you are still mixing up the layers of abstraction. You need to distinguish between Maxwell's amendment to Ampere's Equation to complete the description of electromagnetism, and his attempts to construct a theory to explain electromagnetism in terms of an Aether. Incidentally, you see unaware that his trial-and-error approach is precisely what is meant by "heuristic". -- Kevin Brunt 00:08, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Since Catt's work is not dealing with extremes of scale neither the Uncertainty Principle, nor non-linearity at 80GeV are relevant. If you look at the voltage step travelling up and down Catt's transmission line, you will find that anywhere between the supply end and the voltage step a current of identical magnitude is flowing; between the voltage step and the open end there is no current flowing; and at the voltage step itself (where the current flow is starting or stopping, depending on which way the step is travelling at the time) there is a changing electric field, (and hence there is displacement current.) Thus any volume that encloses a part of (one conductor of) the TL that includes the voltage step has an imbalance of current flow plus displacement current, and any volume that does not include the voltage step has identical current flows in and out, and no displacement current. -- Kevin Brunt 00:08, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Furthermore, the stepwise voltage increase at the supply end of the TL is not some sort of "quantisation", it is merely an artifact of the finite length of the TL - if it were quantised, the steps would not be infinitely variable in both time and voltage by varying the length and the supply resistance. And if Catt had used the full form of the Telegrapher's Equations, not the approximations that assume that the resistance of the conductors can be ignored, he would have found that the dispersion would eventually smear the edge of the step into indetectability. -- Kevin Brunt 00:08, 21 February 2006 (UTC)
 * God! I thought I was argumentative: but you two take the biscuit. Is anything we can use in the article going to comeo ut of this lot?--Light current 01:05, 21 February 2006 (UTC)


 * When Catt's TEM wave is corrected to include the fact that the step has a finite not a zero rise time, there is electromagnetic radiation emission sideways. Each conductor emits an inverted mirror image of the electromagnetic radiation pulse of the other, so the conductors swap energy.  This is the true mechanism for the "displacement current" effect in Maxwell's equations.  The electromagnetic radiation is not seen at a large distance because when the distance from the transmission line is large compared to the gap between the conductors, there is perfect interference, so no energy is lost by radiation externally from the TL.  Also, the electromagnetic radiation or "displacement current" is the mechanism of forces in electromagnetism.  It shows that Maxwell's theory of light is misplaced, because Maxwell has light propagating in a direction at 90 degrees to "displacement current".  Since light is "displacement current" it goes in the same direction, not at 90 degrees to it.  Nigel 172.143.76.169 10:47, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Changes to the main page
LC, I see you've a bit of my text about Catt and Exclusive-OR. This probably is useful, but the text needs a good deal of work to be done to it - I'll have a think about it. -- Kevin Brunt 23:48, 23 February 2006 (UTC)


 * OK!--Light current 23:54, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

What does need some radical attention, I'm afraid, is the section referencing Gerardus 't Hooft. To the extent that it refers to Catt's work it is merely repetitious, and it then heads off into Nigel's quarrels about quantum mechanics and string theory, which simply don't belong on a page that is specifically about "Ivor Catt". -- Kevin Brunt 23:48, 23 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Yes this need sorting as well! Iv removed most of it--Light current 23:54, 23 February 2006 (UTC)