Talk:Ivor Catt

Earlier talk archived at talk:Ivor Catt/archive#1

Controversial

A lot of this stuff doesn't seem controversial at all. Maybe just mistated? For instance,

"He also quoted as reasoning that any charge caused by such displacement current in a capacitor would need to appear at all points on the capacitor plates instantaneously and therefore needs to travel at superluminal velocities from the leads to the extremities of the plates."

This is obviously true, not controversial. All components can be modeled as transmission lines, but it's usually not important to be that detailed, and just treat them as if the charges travel instantaneously. They can be modeled in an even more detailed way than the transmission line model, too, if desired.

I don't really like the tone of the article. Stuff like the public arguments section needs references. — Omegatron 15:32, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

I agree, the article doesn't do a good job of identifying which ideas are controversial and why. See my poynting vector = energy current comment above. Pfalstad 20:29, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Is it getting controversial enough now? Have you seen this before?

The <s!>five </s!> six stages of theory acceptance:

a) Its not true, it cant be true

b) It might be true, but it has no importance.

c) It is true, but has no real meaning

d) It is true and maybe its important

e) I thought of it first

f) Its not controvertial at all - it obvious! --Light current 20:43, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

Copper = infinite dielectric

I'm sure I've read in other (mainstream) books that a conductor acts like an infinite dielectric. Sometimes the math works that way. Of course, I can't imagine how you could model an infinite dielectric at the molecular level, other than as a conductor. If a material is infinitely polarizable, that means the (net) charges can move anywhere, so it's a conductor. Does Catt deal with solid state physics at all? I don't see how he could, with all these wild ideas. And how does he deal with resistance? Pfalstad 03:35, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Resistance arises as normal due to electric current, not necessarily Heaviside energy current. Dr Walton first tested Catt's conjucture that two similar electromagnetic signals, sent in opposite directions along the same transmission line, would not have any resistance for the duration of their overlap. The measurements of Walton were published in Wireless World letters, 1981, and in Catt's book Death of Electric Current.

While they overlap, there is no voltage variation along that part of the transmission line. This means that there is no conduction current and Heaviside energy flows with no resistance!

This is only because there is no resultant current at that point, hence no H field hence ExH =0, hence no energy. There is still resistance tho'!--Light current 18:33, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

We know this anyway because when you connect an open-ended transmission line to battery, it charges up at light speed without heating up, because the energy flows out, reflects at the end, and returns to the battery. All that happens is that the energy current charges up the cable like a capacitor, and there is no heating once it is fully charged because the energy flowing outward along the wires equals that returning, so the voltage is constant and there is no electron drift current and no resistance.

This is why Catt argued back in the 1960s to get away from multiconductor cables, like the old parallel printer cables with many pins, and use just a single transmission line for information travelling both ways. Not only does it avert cross-talk, it also saves some electricity in long cables if signals are sent both ways at the same time, because there is no resistance while the signals overlap. (Of course, if you try explaining this simple stuff to most people they have so little contact with reality that they think electric pulses sent in opposite directions down the same cable will collide and either cancel out or rebound!)

There is resistance. Its just that the algebraic sum of the currents in duplex transmission may equal zero. So no current= no energy loss! Also, the concept of rebounding is also a valid one as is the concept of signals passing through one another. So, equal lkevel pulses sent in opposite directions dowm a TL can be considered either to rebopund off each other, or to pass through each other. The result is the same!.--Light current 18:15, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

The only motions involved is the electromagnetic radiation which gives rise to Coulomb's law (gauge bosons of electromagnetism), electron spin, and electron motion (typically 1% of the speed of light).

It is very hard to know which pieces of experimental proof should be used to convince people of the correctness of Catt's basic work. Really, the facts should be presented in a way lucid to children, because electricity is a fundamental scientific application.

I like the idea of pulses being sent down lines and reflecting etc. Most of Catts work can be explained this way. Its simple to understand and intuitive. No maths required, (esp no vector calculus!)--Light current 18:18, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

Catt's biggest mistake is trying to present the facts in the standard mathematical way, which of course is just what everybody avoids reading. Unless you can first convince someone of the basic correctness of the physical concepts involved in a simple way, they will not read the mathematics. Once they accept the evidence, they are generally no help because they are in the same or worse position as Catt, with nobody listening. Eventually after enough disasters due to EMC, the cover-ups may be discovered by the deceased, and action taken. You always have to have a lot of deaths before any innovation will be taken seriously, that's traditional.

By Catt supporter?

Recent addition of large amount of new material by 172.216.12.45

I believe these additions have been made by a reputable and knowledgable contributor on this subject by the name of Mr Nigel Cook. Who may shortly be getting his own page!!--Light current 03:52, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

In now have some doubt as to the originator of these posts from URL 172.216.12.45.--Light current 04:40, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

God forbid that he should get his own page on Wikipedia.

Why not? --Light current 20:26, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

"... the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. Thus it happens that whenever those who are hostile have the opportunity to attack they do it like partisans, whilst the others defend lukewarmly..." - http://www.constitution.org/mac/prince06.htm

If you look at Catt's experiences in life, you see that it is a very soul destroying activity to be an innovator. He is continually fighting battles with only lukewarm support!

I think he will get more support when his ideas are properly understood. This page on him is probably the biggest break he has ever had! However, this page will not be a propaganda page for Catts ideas but will be neutrally written piece with no points of view expressed one way or the other. It is up to the readers to decide o for themselves the validity of Catts arguments--Light current 18:04, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

ATC stuff

That whole section seemed full of irrelevant details and innuendo. If you want to talk about Catt's ATC proposal, the need for it, and the "suppression" of it, be my guest. But stick to the facts. But leading with some story about an ATC disaster (taking for granted that it wouldn't have happened if people had listened to Catt) seems very POV. And what does that email have to do with anything? Pfalstad 19:40, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

I believe this was added by Nigel Cook and probably needs some POV removals. However, it will take some intensive reseasrch to establish the unbiased story I feel.--Light current 20:29, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

Images of Catt

Pfalstad and Light current, is there any way to get a photo of Catt on the site, say the small Electronics World http://www.ivorcatt.com/illus/ivor_anam.jpg (which is openly published and is can be used under fair-trading copyright law provided credit is given Electronics World magazine) which shows Catt with the "product of the year award" from a magazine for his 1988 160 MB spiral WSI product?

Yes. Just upload the image giving it a suitable name and fill in the copyright details (use the upload file tab and follow instructions). Then the image can be put into the article. Picture credits are not normally included on the article pages though!--Light current 18:02, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

EMC

What is it? Pfalstad 19:40, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

ElectroMagnetic Compatability for electronic equipment.

Nigel Cooks view

It appears that Nigel cook uses the term displacement current to describe what we all know and love as em energy! Extract form his page:

Charge is not conserved which is why the fifth Maxwell equation was dropped when charge creation from gamma rays exceeding the energy equivalent of two electrons was discovered in 1932. The abuse from ignorant crackpots is well documented. Catt himself refuses to concentrate on the facts. The ‘displacement current’ is radio wave energy. The entire electromagnetic theory of Maxwell’s light/radio is false.

my bolding.

This terminology usage does not help anyone in sorting out the real truth an Im sure Ivor Catt did not confuse the two terms displacement current and em energy --Light current 21:41, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Light Current: please note the difference in directions! The "displacement current" (for want of a better word, perhaps "radio current" is best) goes at a 90 degree angle to the em energy of the traditional TEM wave or Heaviside slab. It goes parallel to the electric field lines, and in the direction from one charge to another. The Heaviside energy current always goes parallel to the conductors! So it would be confusing if cook used em energy for both??!

I have noted the differing directions. I personally do not believe in anything flowing from one plate to another. I believe em energy flows parallel to the plates and this is the direction of the energy current.--Light current 20:06, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

Catt only deals with the Heaviside slab of energy current. Heaviside thought em energy was just guided by two conductors, according to Catt. This means that Catt ignores the situation of one capacitor plate receiving the TEM wave energy first, such as then you but a capacitor in a circuit: ____||______ The first capacitor plate charges up, and energy flows across the gap to induce a charge on the second plate!

Well I have my own theory about this and its not the same as you describe, but I feel it inappropriate to discuss it here as we are trying to write an article on Catt and only on Catt!--Light current 20:01, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

Notice that there is a time delay involved here, and transverse motion of energy. This is completely ignored by Catt, who simply ignores such situations and omits them from his books as if they don't exist. Since this page is not a propaganda forum for Catt, should it be pointed out here that Heaviside's slab of energy current led Heaviside to make his biggest blunder?

The only time delay in a capacitor charging with energy current is the time it takes to do the round trip along the capacitors TL--Light current 20:08, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

Heaviside was asked about the possibility of a wave guide, which is used now to guide microwaves from the emitter to the antenna without loss. It is just a metallic box of suitable dimensions for the wavelength being used. Heaviside thought a wave guide is just a parallel-plate transmission line with sides added, creating a short circuit! Because he "knew" that two conductors only guide TEM wave energy between then if they are not short circuited, Heaviside was certain that wave guides were nonsense.

I believe wave guides operate differently from TLs. Heaviside obviously knew as little about them as I do--Light current 20:10, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

It was his biggest blunder, and it disproves the dogma of the TEM wave. The TEM wave can be a useful concept, but the physical dynamics of where the energy is going and how the energy delivered in the wires comes at the speed of the insulator between them, is covered up.

I don't understand this para.--Light current 20:14, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

Catt's position seems to be that he is unprepared to go into the dynamics behind the TEM wave, and will only deal with problems which Heaviside's "energy current" can be applied to. This means that he cannot deal with radio, which is a capacitor problem where the plates are separated by a significant distance in comparison to their length, and one charges before the other. From this perspective, the nature of a radio wave is an energy flow in the direction of the "displacement current" and the equation for that is describing radio. This is not the original Maxwell theory, which is wrong since it has displacement current at a 90 degree angle to radio propagation direction.

I have asked before for you to justify your claims of radio via capacitance. i.e. what is the value of capacitance, over 500mi, what is the loss etc. No reply!--Light current 20:14, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

We must assume, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that the above material under hdg Nigel Cooks view and indented by one tab stop, is the work of Mr Nigel Cook. It certainly looks like his style!.--Light current 20:44, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

Light current: The capacitance is not going to be very big if the two conductors are miles apart! It could be calculated, but it would have to be time-dependent due to the distance. I don't see why you would need the precise value anyway for practical situations of radio. The mechanism is still of interest. The key thing is that there is a transmission of energy from one capacitor plate to the other, for conservation of energy in the circuit. The energy can't disappear from one plate and magically reappear in the other without traversing the gap.

Why not calculate the approximate capacitance then and work out the loss (in dB) to see if it makes any sense at all as a theory? I suggest the mechanism would be completely impractical but you could prove me wrong!--Light current 09:15, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

My v. quick calc shows that, with plates 1 sq m spaced at 100km the capacitance is 8.854 E-19 F. Assuming an angular freq of 100Mr/s, this gives a reactance of 1E10 ohms. Now assume 1k source and load impedances (quite high I would think for radio). This gives an attn of approx 1E-7. In dBV this is 140dB. Thatis ther is 140dB voltage loss between transmitter and reciever. Are you seriously expecting people to believe that ridiculous figure?

Correct. It is transmitted as em energy!--Light current 03:50, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

If it does flow across the gap, as it must, it is behaving like radio waves between two parallel aerials.

Radio wave yes. displacement current , no--Light current 03:50, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

Catt will only deal with what happens if you connect a pair of wires to a pair of battery terminals at the same time. This is the Heaviside slab of energy current, and he can do an awful lot with it, for which deserves full credit.

What catt will do is what we are writing about.--Light current 03:50, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

The problem is that this approach to electromagnetism cannot deal with the situation where one conductor is connected to a potential and the other is passive. This is the case where you have a TEM wave or Heaviside slab of energy encountering the first capacitor plate in a capacitor, before anything can reach the second plate.

Not our problem on WP!--Light current 03:50, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

It is the ideal time to identify sort out problems. If this is not done, it will prevent Catt's work being generalised. It is only a modification to Catt's calculations to include the effects of radio transmission between conductors such as capacitor plates, although there are various corrections for time lags, dispersion of radiated energy, etc.

We are not a propaganda machine for you or Catt or anyone!--Light current 03:50, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

At present the major problem in preventing Catt's work from being accepted widely is that he does not make it clear where it applies and where it doesn't. I think his advances are massive enough to stand on their own two feet without being propped up by vague and misleading assertions that they replace everything. If you use Catt's stepwise charging curve to derive the correct equation for "displacement current" (really the current associated with radio emission from a charging capacitor plate to the other one), you get a grip on the mathematical change that allows you to all kinds of things, such as the idea that quantum theory arises from energy going into an atom which is effectively a type of charged capacitor (electron and proton, charges). The stepwise charging can be related to the energy levels of an electron.

No comment. I have my own views but Im not going to air them here.--Light current 03:50, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

The suppression of Catt has prevented good peer-review. His most important ideas have been banned from scientific discussion. If some things are exaggerated and others are not followed up far enough, it is not his fault. But readers should benefit from pointing out these things. It will make the subject more rigorous and useful, and less crazy looking to readers!

I have some sympathy for Catt., but WP is not a shoulder to cry on!--Light current 03:50, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

(See also recent response in the "Displacement Current" section above, about the row between Professor D.A. Bell and Catt in Wireless World. Bell claimed "displacement current" is vital in Maxwell's mathematical theory of radio waves, validated by Hertz. This eventually led to Catt being suppressed from Wireless World for a decade, after many heated letters-column exchanges. Catt states that he reported Bell for misconduct, but the IEE came down on Bell's side.

It would more accurate, based on what Catt says on his own websites, to say that Bell put forward the standard definition of a transverse electromagnetic wave in which the "displacement current" term in the Ampere-Maxwell equation plays a vital role. Catt wanted to quote Bell's writing in a book. Bell refused permission; not unreasonably, given that Catt is a dab hand at out-of-context quotes. Catt complained to the IEE. This looks far more like spite than anything else. -- Kevin Brunt 22:26, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

This is all down to Tom Ivall, editor of Wireless World, not promoting Catt's discovery for what is really was - the correction of the formula for the mythical "displacement current" but instead vaguely just claiming that Catt's paper disproved any such thing. Don't repeat this mistake here on Wikipedia. Ivall's error had the tragic consequence of allowing Catt to be suppressed and ridiculed since 1978.)

Noted. But this is your POV--Light current 03:50, 31 December 2005 (UTC) We will aim to give a fair and just representation of the facts as the consensus of editors see them.--Light current 03:16, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

No, it is not anybody's "point of view", it is a fact. The statement in the article as it stands is totally false: "he claims that Maxwell's displacement current term is not in fact needed to explain capacitor operation because displacement current is not needed in a transmission line." (See the long bitter rows this "innocent" claim has created, and the stagnation of electromagnetism as a result: [1])

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." [2]

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 [3]. 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: [4], where Woit says that the first line of defence against crackpots is to ignore them, while a commentator replied [5]: "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 [6]: "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 [7]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: [8] 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: [9]. 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 [10]. 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: [11] and see here for Woit's response: [12]!!!!!!

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.: [13]. Updated version: [14].

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!  :-) -— Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.201.169.226 (talk • 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)

More comments on Catt

However, Catt's inability to take on board legitimate criticism of his work is a large part of the whole story. The Dec 78 "capacitor-as-transmission-line" article is a case in point. The result that a transmission line fed via a very large impedance charges in a stepwise fashion that approximates to the charging curve of a capacitor is interesting, but does not challenge the "standard view." Catt et al failed to see that the equations they are using are derived from a model of the transmission line that includes capacitance in the first place.

The reason that they don't need to mention charge explicitly is that their equations describe the TL in terms of the impedances at its ends, and the propagation of voltage along it. Since the impedance is "resistive", there is no need to deal with the current flow at the ends, because it is entirely determined by Ohm's Law, and the article doesn't look at what's happening as the "voltage step travels along the TL to need to analyse the current.) Likewise, since the article is dealing with the consequence of the capacitance of the TL, rather than at the capacitance itself, it is not dealing at a level where the physics of the displacement current is relevant.

Thus the two tendentious points are not supported by the work presented in the article.

Are you talking about Catts article or our article on WP?--Light current 14:58, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Further, the article is trying to use the TL to approximate a sector of a circular parallel-plate capacitor. There is a problem here, because the TL model does not include the obvious fact that the "unit capacitance" of an arc on the sector varies with increasing radius. The article of open to serious adverse criticism, not because of the non-constant unit capacitance itself, but because the article has completely failed to address the issue. If it had done so, it would have opened a very large can of worms to do with the propagation of voltage/charge/energy over a 2-D surface, rather that along a 1-D line.

The article would never have been accepted by a peer-reviewed journal precisely because of these problem. Shorn of the problems, it probably would not have contained enough "meat" to make a worthwhile journal article, but would still have been an interesting article in Wireless World.

The questions I've raised are soluble, (or at least open to further work,) but Catt&Co have not done so. Instead, Catt treats the article as a finished work that contains absolute proof of an "error" in physics and trots it out in support of his further arguments.

The boot of Catt's "heresy" argument is actually on the other foot, since his position is rather like that of the Church in the "Pope v Gallileo,etc" arguments, where the Church has got into a mess by saddling up the writings of Aristotle, etc, with theology to get "Absolute Truth", which led to serious problems when "real science" can along and started to find out that some of the "facts" handed down by the ancients were merely speculation.

Catt seems to think that the sort of demonstration of "how the equations work" that you find in a school science text book constitute a proof that the theory is "correct". He misses the fact that the presentation of the results is preceded by a lot of careful experimental work designed both to prove the correctness of the theory, and to eliminate alternative theories. Catt has done none of this experimental work, and he is not coming up with anything that contradicts the "standard theory". -- Kevin Brunt 13:55, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

How much experimental work did Albert Einstein do before proposing his theories of special and general relativity?--Light current 14:50, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

The difference is that Einstein was pushing forward into an area where theory was lacking. Special relativity in particular gets described in terms of how "Einsteinian mechanics" differs from "Newtonian mechanics". The first part of Einstein's paper, however, starts off with Maxwell's equations. If I understand what I've been reading on the Web correctly, SR is a way of dealing with a serious contradiction between Newtonian mechanics and Maxwell's equations. Einstein's achievement was less about the "new" ideas (which were, in fact, already floating around) and more about be willing to stick everything together in one paper and send off to be published. Einstein was adding mathematics to existing experimental observations.

Catt on the other hand is trying to supplant an existing theory. For all his fuss about Occam's Razor, it is he who is trying to adduce an unnecessary entity, namely his "em wave". He has posited that this wave exists, and come up with a description of how it behaves. However, his theory yields results that are identical to the existing theory; in order for Catt's theory to prevail he would need to demonstrate that it is superior. This would entail demonstrating that it works in circumstances that the existing theory does not, or that it gives better results, or that it is easier to use. Catt has not tried to do this; he has, in fact, not even devised any experiments to demonstrate the existence of the "em wave". Furthermore, his theory tends to avoid the resistance of the conductor, which puts it at a disadvantage to the electron drift/mean free path description, which can come up with sensible predictions for the conductance of metals. -- Kevin Brunt 22:29, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

If you feel a need to edit the page to reflect more accurately the true events, please feel free to do so. We here are not trying to convince readers one way or the other about Catts ideas!

--Light current 15:04, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Charge movement or electromagnetic waves propagation

The "Catt Anomaly" is a case in point. If you wade through all the obfuscation (and the libellous comments) in his "book" on the subject, you will find that it all boils down to the difference between what he says that his Question says ("...when a battery...") and what he actually wrote ("...when a TEM step ... guided ...".) The former is about current flow in a conductor, the latter is about waveguides. Catt thinks they are the same thing, real physicsts know that there are important distinctions. In the absence of sufficient context, Catt's question is ambiguous, and it is not surprising that it elicits contradictory answers. The responses from McEwan and Pepper clearly show this and if Catt had bothered to read them properly he would have see this. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that Catt is simply not interested in resolving the question. -- Kevin Brunt 15:15, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

If you think there are important distictions between current flow and em propagation, would you care to explain them? If you think Catts question is ampbiguous, why not try to formulate what you think the question should be rather than just engage in critisism of Catt?--Light current 01:54, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Current flow is the motion of charge. Everything that predates the discovery of the electron will use the concept of "conventional current", which is, of course, merely an arbitrary convention that makes it easier for physicists to discuss what they're doing. When convention current flows, the charge that moves is itself also "conventional." At this level we dispense with Nigel Cook's mutterings about "mechanism"; conventional charge moves around as necessary to match the observed behaviour, and that's all we need to know in order to understand electricity and magnetism, up to and including Maxwell's Equations.

I'm afraid the actual mechanism of current is important. This is because charge carriers cannot move at the speed of em radiation. This fact is accepted by conventional physicists. Brearing this fact in mind, how would you now explain em radiation and the fact it travels at light speed?--Light current 23:33, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Of course, since scientists always want to know "why", they were pleased when the electron was discovered, because they were able to construct a explanation for the observed behaviour in terms of the motion of the electrons in the (metallic) conductor. What was even nicer is that the explanation forms part of a "supertheory" that answers the big "why" of chemistry as well. In particular, it can explain the "why" of how a battery works.

Catt, in discarding charge, discards all the rest of it as well. He has no way of explaining how the "chemistry" in the battery creates the voltage step that is somehow a "TEM" step travelling down the transmission line. Furthermore, he has never produced an experiment that demonstrates that his TEM step exists with the properties required to fit the observed behaviour.

Catts explanation of a battery is that it consists of two counter propagting em waves that sum to dc, just like the charged transmission line case.--Light current 23:33, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

This just begs the question as to how the battery has a suitable "em wave" to hand. At some point the "em wave" has to be brought into existence by extracting extracting energy from the chemical reactions going on the battery. Catt has no explanation for this. Equally he has no real explanation for how the energy of the "em wave" is eventually extracted and delivered into the load. Equally his theory ducks the issue of the resistance of the conductor. It is clear that when you have a pulse travelling along a conductor, energy is being lost into the resistance irrespective of the direction of the pulse. Catt's argument requires that when two such pulses cross that the energy loss somehow cancels out; actually, it is necessary that the waves cancel because that's what fits the observed facts. The physicists don't have this problem; their pulses are moving charges; the opposing velocities sum to zero, leaving an instantaneous state where the whole of the energy is held in the capacitance before the charge starts to flow again. In each case the "standard" explanation yields the same observed result, but without the "magic" that Catt's theory requires. -- Kevin Brunt 20:42, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

Basically, the Catt Anomaly is this:-

Catt says that when you apply a voltage step to a conductor, some sort of a "TEM step" comes into existence and travels along the conductor, outside the conductor. He has all sorts of loose ends, including a lack of an explanation for the observed current flow, and a reason why the "TEM" thing propagates at the TL characteristic velocity (which is influenced by the conductor spacing), and not at the speed of light of the medium that surrounds the conductors. There are a whole host of other difficulties.

The observed current flow is simply V/Z where Z is the surge impedance of the line(=sqrt(L/C). This can easily be demonstrated with a sq wave gen and a piece of coax. Velocity is sqrt(LC)--Light current 23:33, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

"Standard physics" says that a current flows in the conductor. There are electromagnetic effects around the conductors, but these are a "side effect" of the current flow not the flow itself.

Ahh but we are dealing here with field theory and not with circuit theory. Cct theory does not work at high freqencies, short timescales. Field theory says that energy flows in th edielectric not in the conductors.--Light current 23:33, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

If you read the responses by McEwan and Pepper, it is perfectly clear that McEwan is a reader of Wireless/Electronics World and is aware of Catt's "heresies". McEwan's answer discusses the reasons why physicists are perfectly happy with the standard explanation. (They don't need an alternative, and for all his obfuscation, Catt has not done the work needed to demonstrate that he has anything important to say.)

I think McEwans answer is a fudge because he says that you can get light speed velocities by electrons (all going much slower) bumping into each other! This is plainly nonsense!--Light current 23:33, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

[The "electron drift velocity" is an average. The explanation of resistance in terms of the "mean free path" clearly shows that the actual motion of the electrons is episodic. You have no information as to what fraction of the time the electrons are in motion, or what their velocity is when they are in motion. Given how large the repulsive forces between electrons are relative to their mass, it is entirely reasonable that individual electrons can accelerate to close to light speed in a distance that is very short compared to the distance to the next "bounce".] -- Kevin Brunt 19:42, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

On the other hand, Pepper (Professor Sir Michael Pepper, as of the New Year's Honours list) had obviously never heard of Catt. He was presented with the problem of extracting some meaning, without the assistance of any additional context, from Catt's Question, which is a masterpiece of muddled thinking. (Frankly, Catt couldn't have achieved a more confusing text if he had deliberately thought it out with both hands for a fortnight.)

I think youll find that Pepper has certainly heard of Catt (especially as Catt wrote to him a number of times)!!

[Please note my use of the past tense "had". I was considering the situation at the time that Pepper wrote his response. Pepper is a nanotechnologist; Hawking is the time travel specialist.] -- Kevin Brunt 19:27, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

Pepper clearly read the question as being about the impingement on the circuit of an electromagnetic wave generated externally, such having the circuit close to the antenna of a radio transmitter.

In fact, the combination of Catt's incompetent Question and his failure to try to understand the responses he got, does rather lead to the suspicion that there was malice aforethought..... -- Kevin Brunt 21:54, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

You really need to read Catts websites carefully to see what has happened over the past 20 years or so. Im sure youll find it interesting.

--Light current 23:33, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

I have. It's really rather sad. It just shows how out of date Catt is. He's not progressed beyond the misconceptions and limitations of his transmission line "EM Theory". He seems still to think that hardware "content-addressable memory" is the technology of the future, even though it has been relegated to niche applications (such as internet routers) by the effective software technologies that were being developed even as he was first writing on the subject in the late 1960's. He inevitably supports Duisberg's quarrel with the "Establishment" on the origin of AIDS. One of his latest forays merely demonstrates his ignorance of the physics that dictated NASA's choice of the East Florida coast for launching rockets, together a hilariously impractical proposal for improving the "efficiency" of the launch by pushing the rocket down something very like a ski jump. (And Catt is an engineer?!) -- Kevin Brunt 21:09, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

Many 'crackpot' ideas have, in the end, been proven to be correct. You think that Catt is a crackpot. You have every right to that opinion. I think some of his ideas happen to be interesting (some others are doubtful)--Light current 23:20, 8 January 2006 (UTC).

Note from Nigel Cook:

I've just seen this dialogue from "Kevin Brunt", who entered into lengthy dialogue over Catt with me on my blog a couple of months back[15]. "Kevin Brunt" seems to be a close relative (clone?) of "Sir Kevin Aylward" (Warden of the Kings Ale, not a very important post when there not a King!), a physics-trained electronics engineer and musician, see [16] Sir Kevin Aylward wrote a couple of letters about Catt's "ignorance" to Electronics World. After the first letter, Catt and myself both had letters in the next issue pointing out Aylward's errors. I had emailed Catt and asked Catt to write about the science and experimental validation.

However, Catt wrote instead a long masterpiece of character assassination about Sir Kevin, first ridiculing his spelling of Feynman as Feynmann, then saying that Sir Kevin was technically at fault. My letter followed, tied down to the facts: Sir Kevin claimed that QED (quantum field theory of electromagnetism, quantum electrodynamics) renormalised equations explained the Catt anomaly to 15 decimal places so Catt was just ignorant. I pointed out the problems in QED, and that the predictions Feynman makes are trivial corrections, not a prediction of Coulomb's law, because you have to "by hand" put the 1/137 coupling factor for electromagnetic force strength into QED to make it work. All it does is to make trivial perturbative corrections to electromagnetism (a 0.116% increase in the magnetic moment of the electron, for example).

Catt is certainly paranoid and ignorant, but "string theorists" are even more so. Sir Kevin's second letter to Electronics World, according to the editor, had to be censored because it was just rude. Ultimately that seems to be Catt's aim, to anger people and get rude, unpublishable letters which lead to the subject being dropped and ignored by the media as some kind of tornado in a tea cup. Personally, I think every bigwig is crackpot in some way, including Sir Kevin, so just throwing around "crackpot" or "****er" does not convey any useful information. Since Jesus only had 10 true followers (forget the doubter and the betrayer), the crackpot-labellers of 30 AD would surely have listed him in first place. But what does that tell you? Hitler, by contrast, was praised widely and had millions of supporters, but that did not ensure he was right. I agree that most of Catt's drivel is worthless, but that does not mean his early work is crazy. Nigel 172.201.155.21 22:53, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Strangely (?)enough, I tend to find myself agreeing with the above sentiments (generally). Everone you dont agree with is a crank or crackpot!--Light current 02:52, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

If someone vaguely says the experimentally proved fact are false or wrong, they are asserting ignorance. The problem with Catt is that he does not know, nor want to learn, Maxwell's equations (the full equations, not just the bits used for mere transmission lines), or modern physics, but nevertheless asserts (without knowledge of them), that they have no content or are drivel. I can state correctly that string theory is not based on observables and does not predict anything potentially measurable, without reading all the maths speculations on the subject. This is not crackpot or "opinion" because it is based on unobserved extra dimensions and has no predictions that are testable. These are facts, and anyone can verify them. But it is false to do the same for modern physics (QFT, general relativity) because it us based on observables, even though the facts are usually embedded in maths. Wave-particle duality is observational fact to the extent that the maths for waves and particles can be applied usefully to the model different observations of the same thing (say, an electron or photon). Gravitation similarly is empirical, it is simply: (experimentally substantiated Newton's law, the low-energy, low-speed limit put into general relativity) + (light speed field spacetime) + (experimentally observed conservation of gravitational potential energy, expressed by the contraction term of Einstein's field equation). All this is both empirically defendable in construction, and also predicts other things that can be tested by measurement. Catt's confusion over what is right and what is wrong is due to a lack of physical understanding. 172.202.239.245 15:37, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Letter to Catt

I'm making a last attempt to get Catt to correct the "Catt Anomaly" diagram:

From: Nigel Cook To: Brian Josephson ; jonathan post ; Forrest Bishop ; George Hockney Cc: Ivor Catt ; CooleyE@everestvit.com Sent: Tuesday, January 10, 2006 10:21 AM Subject: Errors of the Catt Anomaly

http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/catanoi.htm

Errors in Catt Anomaly

1. The Catt anomaly diagram shows a true step, which can't occur in reality. There is always a rise-time, albeit a short one. During the rise time T, voltage and current varies gradually from 0 to the peak current i, so the current variation is on the order di/dT, which is a charge acceleration that causes radio emission with frequency f ~ 1/T. (The Catt anomaly diagram shows 0 rise time, so di/dT would be INFINITE, resulting in an infinitely powerful burst of radio energy of infinitely high frequency, which is absurd.)

2. When you correct the Catt anomaly diagram, you realise that there is radio emission in the direction of traditional displacement current, which Catt fails to show.

3. You also notice that the radio energy emission depends on di/dt, which only occurs while the logic step voltage and current are varying, like displacement current.

4. Catt's diagram of the Catt anomaly is totally wrong for a completely different reason: it shows displacement current continuing after the logic step has passed, in other words, in the part of the step to the left, where Catt shows the voltage is steady.

This is a LIE, because displacement current i = [permittivity].dE/dt = [permittivity].dv/(dt.dx). This shows that displacement current ONLY flows if voltage varies with distance along the transmission line (x) or time (t).

Catt should delete all the displacement current arrows (labelled D) which point downwards in the second diagram, and only show it as occurring where the step rise occurs! Catt will then notice that he has discovered the correct disproof of Maxwell's radio theory. While Maxwell had displacement current at 90 degrees to radio propagation, the two actually are the same thing, so Maxwell's theory of radio is false. Will Catt publish this?

Nigel Cook

172.200.175.77 10:56, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

Discussion on letter content

I tend to agree that the D s should not exist-- at all! (not even at the step). That's because I believe that nothing flows from one conductor to the other in a capacitor or TL. Energy flows along the line -that is all. This question of infinitesemal rise time is not relevant to the problem. How does your view differ from this?--Light current 23:21, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

The easiest fix is to pretend that the D's are E's, so that the arrows represent the electric field. Obviously, E is changing where the step is, so there is some displacement current there as well. Exactly what the displacement current is doing doesn't matter. Perhaps we should just coin the verb "to maxwell", which is defined to be what displacement current does....

What do you mean by the term displacement current?--Light current 02:15, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't think I mean anything by it other than "This is a situation where Maxwell's correction of Ampere's equation is important." We're still waiting for the physicists to finally decide exactly what "charge" and "electric field" and "magnetic field" actually are. In the meantime we can just stick the numbers into the formulae and use the results. -- Kevin Brunt 15:00, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

The point about dE/dt happening where the step is has been there ever since Catt, etc, first advanced the transmission line argument. It is part and parcel of moving from a point capacitance to one where the capacitance is dstributed evenly along a line. The step marks the point where the actual charging of the capacitor is happening. Overall the total amount of "dE/dt" ought to be determined only by the final voltage and the total capacitance.

Nigel's references to "radio emission" and "radio energy" are introducing a new complication. The normal use of the term "radio" would be to refer to transverse electromagnetic waves, which are self-sustaining "things" which travel at the speed of light, and which are very precisely defined by physicists. Nigel does not appear to have done any of the work needed to demonstrate that what is going on around the conductor conforms to the definition of a TEM wave. There seems to be an implication in what he's written that displacement current is TEM. This is certainly not the case; TEM is a very specific set of circumstances. Maxwell's mathematical insight allowed him to spot that the "TEM equations" were compatible with what we now call "Maxwell's Equations". He was probably gobsmacked when he realised that he was predicting a velocity of propagation virtually identical to the speed of light. I will not, however, believe that Maxwell ever claimed that everything with "displacement current" had to be TEM. Nor did he have a "radio theory"; that is tangling his work up with that of Hertz, and particularly Marconi. Nigel is creating a false picture. -- Kevin Brunt 02:00, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

I tend to agree with all of your last paragraph Kevin--Light current 02:15, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

I should also have added that Nigel's "radio emission" has a lot in common with Ivor Catt's original references to a "TEM step". The diagram clearly shows although there is undeniably something "electromagnetic" going on in and around the conductors, there is clearly current flow in the conductor (ie moving charge), which is in contradiction with the TEM equations which have no charge, but only (changing) electric and magnetic fields. Furthermore, the diagram clearly shows that the "em" involved is a result of the applied voltage; Catt's question starts "when a TEM step". Catt is thus placing the "TEM" as the "primary thought". He thinks that the voltage step and the "TEM step" are synonymous, a proposition that is at variance with his diagram. This is actually what the Catt Anomaly really is. -- Kevin Brunt 15:00, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Kevin and Light Current: I have built various radio projects and also understand the maths of radio emission. There is evidence that this is the sideways effect from each conductor to the other which determines the speed of electricity (electric step goes at the average speed of the medium between the two conductors, as measured on sampling oscilloscopes). I'm talking of the physical mechanism. You aren't going to understand electricity without getting to the facts of what is really occurring. If displacement current is identical to the radio emission effect, then that is very significant. Radio induces currents. If each conductor is transmitting to the other, it would explain how currents arise! When the electric field is varying (increasing in the 0 to v volt step) you get varying current, and this emits radio waves in the direction perpendicular to the current, i.e., in the direction of so-called "displacement current". What part of this can't you grasp? Thank you very much for your opinions that the facts presented properly introduce "clutter" or present a "false picture". The fact is the opposite. You can politically ignore these facts (as Catt does) but that is not being scientific. I don't have to admit that more work needs to be done, because that's what I've been asking for for many years. By the way, Kevin, it was Heaviside in 1875 who did the TEM work, Maxwell's didn't do that many electrical experiments (he relied on reading Faraday's Experimental Researches and doing maths about an elastic aether, etc.) 172.202.239.245 15:18, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Yes, Nigel, a fast voltage edge travelling down a conductor is likely to generate electromagnetic interference. You cannot, however, assume that the orientation of the generated fields will be the same as that produced by a sinusoidal voltage/current applied to a "resonant" conductor. Catt's diagram applies to a voltage pulse of any duration, and the correct "scientific" method of analysis should be consider the "steady-state" cases before and after the step in order to understand them properly, before going onto the more complex problem of understanding what is happening where the voltage is actively changing. Catt's work, and yours, fails entirely to deal with the "DC case" properly, and is seriously flawed thereby.

Catt's diagram, (and his "Electromagnetism" book,) both show clearly that for all his assertions that he has disposed of "charge", his "TEM wave" actually comprises the electric and magnetic fields due to the charge in the capacitance conductor and the motion of the charge (ie current) in the inductance. Hence Catt's "wave" is created by the charge in the conductor. Therefore, it cannot, by definition, be a self-sustaining "vibration" in "free space" as is meant by physicists when they use the term "transverse electromagnetic wave". Catt is using the term "TEM" for something other than the "agreed meaning", and the "Catt Anomaly" is merely the confusion caused thereby. Ask a silly question, get a silly answer.

Incidentally, it ought to be obvious that as well as there being a changing electric field between the conductor at the point where the voltage step is (perpendicular to the conductor), that there is a changing electric field in front of the step in the direction of the conductor. Whatever the displacement current is doing, it is not merely doing it in a straight line between the conductors, but is doing it in three dimensions around the point on the conductor that the voltage step has currently reached! -- Kevin Brunt 22:08, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

20 January 2006

Kevin: before the TEM step arrives at any part of the cable, there is zero voltage. As it arrives, the voltage increases and with it the current. Once it has peaked, it remains steady. The only period of interest is while the voltage is rising. Ivor ignores this, and also introduces other errors like the claim that displacement current flowing where the voltage is steady. Your sine wave radio signal versus square wave logic step argument is vacuous, since radio emission occurs so long as di/dt is not zero in any part of the aerial. Fourier analysis is useful to me for the purpose of translating a plot of current or field strength versus time into a frequency spectrum. According to Fourier analysis, you can represent a square wave as a series of sine waves! But that's not my main argument.

Consider the 2 conductor transmission lines as 2 parallel radio aerials. If you feed one with a signal (of any type) and leave the other passive, the first transmits energy to the passive one which receives energy only as a result of di/dt in the first one. This is indistinguishable from Maxwell's "displacement current" equation. Maxwell says vacuum "displacement current" i = e.dE/dt = e.dv/(x.dt) where e is permittivity and x is the width over which the step rises (definition: x = ct, where t is the rise-time). We see that if x = 0, then i = infinity. This disproves the idea of a truly abrupt step. Moreover, the current rises over the rise-time from 0 to its peak, and since radio emission occurs in proportion to di/dt, it becomes more intense as the step rise-time is made smaller.

Now here is the proof. Taking the 2 parellel aerials or transmission line conductors. Feed one with any signal, and feed the other with the inversion of that signal. While the signal strength rises, electrons accelerate and radio emission occurs in a perpendicular direction.

I've done this experiment and proved it experimentally. During the rise-time, each conductor transmits a radio signal that is the exact opposite of that emitted from the other conductor. At a long distance (several times the distance of the gap between the two conductors) there is no observable radio transmission at all, because each radio emission cancels out that of the other: perfect interference. (The same concept is often used as white noise to suppress sounds, but that is less effective.)

The point is that the entire radio energy emitted by each conductor during the step is transmitted to, and received by, the other conductor. This is the process by which the TEM wave is allowed to propagate. Catt, ironically, gives the conventional textbook slab of drivel on this point! See [17] (that web version misses out the formulae, but they are widely known) where Catt calculates the inductance of a single wire and finds: "The self inductance of a long straight conductor is infinite. This is a recurrence of Kirchhoff's First Law, that electric current cannot be sent from A to B. It can only be sent from A to B and back to A." I think it is unhelpful for Catt, having defined E and B in fixed ratio for a TEM wave (E=cB), then goes along with the unfruitful textbook treatment of inductance which considers inductance as a B field effect! The magnetic field loops around each conductor instead of going from one conductor to the other line "displacement current" or in fact radio energy. This is probably where the conventional theory went wrong! It is clear that the entire energy needed to propagate the TEM wave is transmitted as radio from one conductor to the other during the step. No loss occurs because the step in each is inverted with respect to the other in a TEM wave. I'm going to do the calculations to demonstrate how this solves the Catt anomaly. 172.209.113.91 20:52, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Nigel, you cannot inject RF into one conductor independent of the other. The RF energy must flow in the dielectric. Or dont you believe in the Poynting vector?--Light current 22:59, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Light current, radio is a fact. The Poynting vector is wrong in the way it is usually taken to suggest that nothing moves except in the propagation direction. The electric field vector, at right angles to the propagation (c labelled) vector also involves energy flow, hence the transverse nature of the wave. Catt interprets Heaviside and Poynting as a longitudinal wave, simply because they don't say anything about the transverse action.

The Poynting vector falsely omits transverse motion of energy: see the illustrated discussion on the blog here: [18]. 172.214.92.156 08:35, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

So, Nigel you are saying that vector calculus has been wrong all these years and so has Mr Poynting? You must publish this ASAP! Im sure it will be of interest to everyone!--Light current 02:15, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Sideways energy flow?

If energy does flow in the direction of the electric (or magnetic) field in a coax cable ( ie radially from inner to outer ), where does this energy go when it hits the outer conductor? Also if this were true, you would be able to inject RF power into one end of a coax with a perfect termination at the other end, and find that some energy had been lost due to radial propagation. I dont believe any results of such an experiment have yet been published. But maybe you know different?--Light current 19:23, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

21 Jan 2006

Nigel has, I fear, opened several new cans of worms. Catt's diagram is, (for all of his denial of the existence of charge), entirely about current flowing in a conductor. If you were to take a TL, terminate it with a resistor that matched the TL's impedance and stick a battery across the open end, Catt's "TEM wave" represents the flow of energy out of the battery, through the TL and into the resistor. This is about what happens after the edge (or between the leading and trailing edges!) not what happens at the edge itself. For a complete pulse, the energy delivered into the resistor is the integral of the instantaneous product of the voltage and current over the duration of the pulse; the shape of the pulse is irrelevant. If there is "radio emission" at the edge, this would manifest as an electromagnetic wave carrying energy away from the conductor; this would reduce the "area under the curve", no doubt by taking the "corner" off the step and slowing the rise time.

I agree with you here Kevin.- the electromagnetic disturbance ceases (to an external observer) when the cable is fully charged to the on load source voltage! But why should em waves suddenly stop- what is the mechanism of stopping them?- That is Catts question--Light current 00:22, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

The fixation with the "edge" is a large part of Catt's "Electromagnetism" altogether. Basically, Catt, and Nigel, and Arnold Lynch, are unable to come to terms with how the motion of the "abstract" charge that is "current" can be explained in terms of the motion of the electrons in the conductor. Now I will agree that it is not well explained in "electricity" text books, but that is because it's not really part of electricity, but rather of "solid-state physics" with a lot of quantum mechanics thrown in. Electrical engineers need to know that the electrons are not moving down the conductor at the speed of light, but they can understand Ohm's Law without needing a postgraduate qualification in quantum mechanics as a pre-requisite!

Im afraid I dont agree that charge carriers can travel at the speed of light- but of course an EM wave can!. The only question is, what is an em wave made of ?. --Light current 00:22, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

-- I think this rather depends on exactly what you mean by "EM" and "wave". A rummage in Google suggests that what's propagating at light speed is the electric field due to the applied voltage, with the electrons following on afterwards. This is not unreasonable; applying simple theoretical mechanics to the "DC case" yields a model where the electrons move as a rigid mass at the electron drift velocity (which is proportional to current) which yields a very clear association in the model between voltage and force. (Nigel, of course, always leaves out the forces when tries this, and comes up with a entirely irrelevant conclusion about the kinetic energy stored in the electrons.) Whether the propagating field constitutes an "EM wave" is a matter of terminology. It may well just be "displacement current". -- Kevin Brunt 03:37, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

If there is coupling between two conductors in close proximity which reduces rapidly with distance, it is entirely possible that there is a capacitive or inductive explanation. -- Kevin Brunt 00:08, 21 January 2006 (UTC)}

My theory is that there is some sort of induced effect in two wires of a twin conductor TL but this is entirely due to the EM energy flowing between them down the dielectric! Poyntings vector again. Do you believe in it?--Light current 00:22, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

My own view is that what's propagating at light speed is the electric and magnetic fields due to the applied voltage, with the electrons following on afterwards as fast as they can. However, I dont call this displacement current, I call it energy current or em energy. You see, there must be some coming together of em field theory at high freq and circuit theory at low freq/dc. This can only be achieved by assuming that whenever physical charges cannot move fast enough, the em wave takes over and makes up the difference to present the ultra fast rise times that weve all? witnessed. BTW can you go back to sequential posting rather than interleaved, as its very confusing when the posts get out of chron order (esp with 3 respondent).--Light current 03:48, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

My aside about "displacement current" was merely to point up that there is a lot going on. The point about "circuit theory" is that it is merely a useful approximation which simplifies calculation at low frequencies. The Telegrapher's Equations which describe a TL at high frequencies are not "em field theory" (although they are closely related to Maxwell's Equations) - they are still derived from Kirchoff's Law, but by doing the "limit as x tends to 0" trick, the finite propagation problem is avoided by explicitly dealing with "where" and "when" which is what circuit theory does not do. One of the ironies of Catt's theories is that he uses the description of the TL in terms of impedance, characteristic velocity and "reflections" at impedance mismatches, which are an approximation derived from the Telegrapher's Equations, while while at the same time rejecting the Equations (and their method of derivation) because they predict a "high frequency cutoff" that the approximations (which ignore the implications of the TL's resistance) do not.

I am far from convinced that "energy current" is helpful. Catt's continually-recirculating "TEM wave" description of a capacitor is entirely due to "energy currents". His "energy current" is actually just the voltage/current product and is merely an obfuscation that conceals the fact that his version ends up with opposing currents flowing in the same conductor (which raises problems with Ohm's Law amongst other things), while the physicists' version has the current brought to a standstill. -- Kevin Brunt 06:36, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Which to you seems the most likely?:

• a) the em waves coninue travelling (like Catt says) or
• b) the waves suddenly stop in zero time undergoing infinite deceleration (like the physicists say)

If you say b), what is the proposed mechanism for the stopping of these travelling waves? --Light current 19:58, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Catt's waves not only have to decelerate, they have to accelerate in the opposite direction as well. If we're dealing with current flow in a conductor, the answer is c) the electrons continue to move at velocities determined by the temperature of the conductor, but the imbalance between the numbers moving with and against the direction of current flow ceases and the associated magnetic field 'evaporates'. The imbalance of charge due to the 'electron drift' however increases to a maximum, so the electric field increases. -- Kevin Brunt 23:13, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Illustration of errors of Catt diagram: [19]. The Poynting-Heaviside vector is false if interpreted as saying that there is no propagation in the E and B vector directions. Forces act in the E and B field directions, and that means that energy is conveyed perpendicularly to the propagation vector c. The reality is that that the Poynting-Heaviside vector (Poynting and Heaviside discovered it independently) is holding back science. Quantum field theory of electrodynamics, which is verified for accurate predictions of (1) Lamb shift, (2) magnetic moment increase of electron due to vacuum and (3) magnetic moment increase of muon due to vacuum, says Coulomb's law is caused by the exchange of gauge bosons, which are photons. Coulomb's law is the force version of Gauss' electric field law, and so we know that photons are moving all the time along electric field lines. This is the cause of the force as specified by the quantum field theory (Feynman diagrams). So there is strong evidence the Poynting vector ignores the dynamics. (Quantum field theory is moving towards an ether picture of the Feynman path integral, due to problems with renormalisation in the purely abstract mathematical model. See arXiv: hep-th/0510040 [20] p85: the virtual particles in the vacuum contradict special relativity and imply a Dirac sea/aether as: 'it is not possible anymore to define a state which would be recognised as the vacuum by all observers'. There is evidence that 'string theory' is hogwash [21] as it makes no testable predictions, but its major rival is the 'spin foam vacuum' of loop quantum gravity, which again is a Dirac sea/aether.) 172.214.92.156 08:53, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Reply to Kevin from LC

I agree that "circuit theory" is merely a useful approximation which simplifies calculation at low frequencies and that the Telegrapher's equations which describe a TL at high frequencies are not "em field theory" but are derived from Kirchoff's Laws. However here we must depart from theory to look at the experimental evidence. Anyone who has worked with square pulses on TLs will tell you that the description of the TL in terms of impedance, characteristic velocity and "reflections" at impedance mismatches are in fact correct.(as far as we can see). THe answer to your apparent paradox here is that you do not allow yourself the "limit as x tends to 0" trick where all components become distributed. When all component values tend to zero in the TL equations, the HF cutoff disappears! There is no inconsistency I feel in the way Catt has interpresed the experimental truths and the theories.

"Energy current" is helpful in thinking about these problems in that one no longer has to think about current and voltages on the wires (which probably do not exist at high frequencies anyway). Energy current will always give the correct answer. How do you think time domain reflectometry works if you dont believe in the Heaviside step of energy current?

Catt's "energy current" is actually the vector cross product of the electric and magnetic field (ie the Poynting vector that no one disputes)--Light current 19:12, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

No, the HF cutoff is real. The full derivation of the Telegrapher's Equations includes the resistance of the conductor and the leakage conductance of the dialectric, which leads to the extra terms that result in the frequency-dependent behaviour. And Catt is well-aware that a TL's resistance causes frequency-dependent results, because he has commented in detail on Heaviside's suggested inclusion of additional inductance to compensate for the problem in telegraph cables and the quarrel with Preece of the British Post Office on the subject.

I am not arguing against the description of a TL in terms of characteristic impedance, etc, because that is precisely what the Telegrapher's Equations predict! The problem lies in, for instance, Catt's pronouncement in chapter 6 of his "Electromagnetics" book where he concludes that the work that derives the Equations is wrong, and goes on to quote Davidson as say that, since a capacitor is a TL, modelling a TL as a capacitor is "absurd". In fact, the equations used by Catt, Davidson and Walton are derived from the modelling of the TL as a sequence of capacitors in the frst place, and the "absurd" gibe can be pointed straight back at Catt.

My objection to "energy current" is precisely that it hides voltage and current. Chapter 1 of Catt's Electromagnetics, while not specifically mentioning energy current, demonstrates the problem. Catt starts by showing that there is a magnetic field related to the charge moving in the inductance and an electric field related to the charge stored in the capacitance and that the energy held in each field is the same. He then treats the combined energy as a "wave" - effectively an "energy" current. He assumes that this wave is reflected off the open end of the TL and travels in the opposite direction.

In the case of a discrete pulse, at the moment the reflected leading edge passes the outbound trailing edge the pulse occupies a section of the line half of its original length, and with a voltage twice the original. Catt asserts that the energy is now flowing in both directions; that the magnetic fields cancel out (but the stroed energy doesn't), and that the two electric fields do not interact (or alternatively that the energy stored in a capacitor is not proportional to the square of the voltage!)

A little bit of thought reveals that the opposing magnetic fields that are cancelled out would be due to current (flow of charge) in opposing directions in the same conductor. A more orthodox analysis would require that the opposing currents cancel out completely, including the magnetic fields and that the correct view is that the reflected leading edge marks the point at which flow ceases. All the energy is stored in the capacitance. This view gets to the same numbers as Catt, and avoids several problems to do with the TL's resistance. -- Kevin Brunt 22:03, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Actually, it was me - my sign-in timed out while I was thinking. -- Kevin Brunt 23:23, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

OK Kevin. But you see what I mean about signing - otherwise we don't know who the hell were talking to do we?--Light current 23:24, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

If the HF cutoff is real, at what frequency does it occur in real coax cables for example? --Light current 22:26, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

The full mathematics is beyond me. However, this is series R and shunt C, which is a "classic" low-pass configuration, so if you calculate 1/RC for a unit length of the cable you'll probably come up with a number that isn't that many orders of magnitude adrift.... -- Kevin Brunt 23:23, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

No you are wrong here. The only cutoff freq is when the cable goes into waveguide mode. This occurs at 20GHz for a 5mm dia cable with polyethylene dielectric. (ref Some questions and answers on fundamentals of coaxial cables - Tektronix UK Ltd c 1977) Losses are different and Im not talking about lossy cables. --Light current 23:58, 21 January 2006 (UTC) The explanation is the at the Ls counteract the Cs and the Cs counteract the Ls giving a purely resistive impedance that is not frequency dependent. (assuming L/C=R/G -- the so called lossless- or Heaviside condition) See Transmission line--Light current 00:41, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

But as you say, the "lossless condition" is a special case; in the general case there is a frequency-dependent component. Incidentally, I'm using the word "cutoff" because Catt does. I'm talking about an increasing attenuation, and related "phase" effects, with increasing frequency. -- Kevin Brunt 00:58, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

No, sorry. try another argument--Light current 00:59, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

It has dawned on me that Catt's "cutoff" may well be the limit above which the "smearing" of the edges of the pulse becomes so bad that the signal is lost. However, my real point is not so much the details of what is happening, but that Catt denies that there is something happening. I think that this is part of his "engineering versus science" mentality, which is probably behind his anti-academic pronouncements. In the half-century since he studied engineering at university there has been a great deal of change in the way that the relationship between "science" and "engineering"; in fact there has been a vast breaking-down of the distinctions between the different "subjects" altogether.

Catt seems not to have broadened his outlook. His writings portray him as having a very narrow view of everything from a 1950's engineering undergraduate point of view, with a vast disdain for the theoretical aspects. Anything that challenges his prejudices is not a opportunity to extend understanding, but is merely dismissed as irrelevant or obfuscation or just plain wrong. -- Kevin Brunt 20:39, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Antennas and Induction fields

I believe Nigel is confused about radio propagation and Poynting's vector and that he is only considering the so called 'induction field' (near field) antennas whose signal strength decreases as the square of the distance from the antenna as opposed the the radiation fields that I am talking about (these field strengths are inversely prop to distance). Induction fields can, in my opinion, pass no energy as they consist of magnetic fields only or electric fields only. Both fields combined together in an em wave are needed to transfer energy from one place to another. If you look at proper high frequency antennas, you find that they are shaped like horns. This is done in order to match the impedance of the transmitter to the impedance of free space (377 ohms). Nigels antenna model is merely an induction antenna transmitting short range electric of magnetic fields only. Thier efficiency at radiating proper em waves is very low.--Light current 01:07, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Nigel have a look at this. See if you agree with it!.[22]--Light current 03:42, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Hi Light Current:

A time-varying current results in radio emission. Neither Catt nor anyone else has measured the fields in the space between two conductors as a TEM wave passes: they have only measured induced currents in other conductors. The diagrams in that article you quote, ignores radio emission occurring at the front of a logic step! Catt got the "Catt anomaly" wrong by relying on a book published in 1893 which ignored the step effects at the front of the TEM wave. Asserting ignorance is wrong. At the front of a logic step, current rises (in accepted picture) and this results in radio emission. Since each conductor is oppositely charged and carries an opposite current, the radio emission from each conductor (acting as aerials) is exactly out of phase with the other and so completely cancels that from the other as seen at a large distance. So there is no energy radiated to large distances! The only radio emission of energy occurs from each conductor to the other.

Yes I tend to agree with the last part of the above paragraph. But are you not changing your story here?. I thought you said before that you can have radiation from one isolated conductor. I said you couldnt! However, your interpretation is I feel slightly wrong. Radiation does not travel from one conductor to the other, iit travels between the conductors as per well knoewn TL theory. Poyntings vector etc. Im ignoring the small near (induction) field effects in open wire lines. And, of course, in coax there are no leakage fields.--Light current 04:17, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Maxwell wrote "displacement current" in terms of electric field strength. However, as the voltage rises at front of the logic step, current rises. Maxwell should have written the extra current (displacement current in vacuum) equation in terms of the ordinary (conductor based) current, which means "displacement current" is radio. Maxwell: displacement current D = e.dE/dt = e(v/ct^2), v is uniform voltage rise over time t. What I'm saying is that the mutual radio emission causes the front of the logic step (the rising part) to propagate. Each conductor induces current in the other! It is fact that the inverse-square law doesn't apply: there is no net radio transmission beyond the system because of perfect interference, as the current rise in each conductor is the exact opposite of that in the other one so the radio transmissions from each conductor exactly cancels the other outside the transmission line! Illustration: [23] Many thanks, Nigel. 172.203.245.250 18:20, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Well Nigel, it looks like you are now 'stealing my clothes'. However, one place we do differ is in the mechanism of high frequency currents being caused to flow in the conductors. You say there is some sort of mutual induction. Well, sort of! I say any currents that can be detected in the conductors will be induced by the em energy flow between them. Think about waveguides! The walls only act to reflect the waves. The only currents in the walls are induced currents. Regarding Maxwell, I agree that in a capacitor, the so called displacement current is indentically equal to the conduction current in the wires. That is trivially obvious. However that does not mean that displacement current actually flows across the plates from one to the other. THe current gets to one side from the other by means if the electromagnetic energy that is liniking both conductors (or plates). My previous posts have a fuller explained this view.--Light current 04:32, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

I am loathe to respond to Nigel's latest post, since he appears to have reposted it following its deletion by an administrator! I am certain that over the years an enormous number of careful and well-designed experiments have been performed on every conceivable configuration of conductor and means of excitation. Nigel's experimental work, on the other hand, would appear to consist entirely of an afternoon's fiddling with a pair of hand-held transceivers, borrowed when his dad wasn't looking. He seems not to realise that in most cases a transmitter antenna is driven by the best approximation to a sinusoid waveform that can be reasonably achieved , precisely in order to avoid the spurious generation of RF energy at uncontrolled and inappropriate frequencies. -- Kevin Brunt 23:19, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

No, Kevin, it involved measurements of radiated field strength with an oscillscope: the radio emission is proportional to di/dt fed into the aerial. You are the one who appears to not have a grasp of this fact. Sine waves are indeed an ideal case because it maximises the overall emission (a square wave input doesn't provide any radio emission at all during the flat parts, just a series of spaced pulses during the rises and falls of the wave. Thanks, Nigel 172.203.223.44 11:50, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Deletion of posts

As far as I am aware, no one has the authority on WP to delete posts on talk pages. If this has happened, it is what we term as vandalism (or an error). The perpetrator will be warned not to repeat this action. --Light current 00:36, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

As Light Current notes, Nigel is clearly observing a "near field effect". I would have said that there was some sort of inductive or capacitive "coupling", but it amounts to much the same thing. I would disagree with LC to the extent that there has to be some transfer of energy, otherwise there could be no signal to be detected, but a radio receiver is specifically designed to detect small signals. -- Kevin Brunt 23:19, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

The external fields around the open wire TL are, in my opinion, near field effects. If any energy were absorbed from these fields, it must affect the transmission of energy along the conductors. However, I wish to restrict the argument to coaxial cable as this simplifies matters greatly in that there are no leakage fields to worry about.--Light current 04:40, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

LC's link is extremely informative. The author might possibly be overasserting his case slightly. It might perhaps be slightly more accurate to say that the electric and magnetic fields surround the moving charge and the fact that some of that surrounding space might be a conductor is merely detail. The important point is that the fields are entirely bound to the charge and its motion, and in the case of a charge moving in a conductor (ie current flow) the motion of the charge is constrained by the conductor. If energy from the charge's motion is lost into the resistance, the energy stored in the fields is reduced. If energy is abstracted from the fields in some way the motion of the charge is affected. (And an antenna is designed specifically to maximise the transfer of energy out of the fields into a "coinciding" transverse electromagnetic wave, which "detachs" itself from the antenna and carries the energy off into "free space".) -- Kevin Brunt 23:19, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Yes, well, the only problem I have with Bill Beaty's description is that he seems to be restricting the cause of fields to charge and charge movements. We all know that charges cannot move at light speed, so the description does not answer all the questions. However, the em energy (energy current) induction theory does appear to explain displacement current (ie that it doesnt exist) and how 'conduction' current can appear to get from one side of a capacitor to the other without actually passing between the plates thro the (vacuum) dielectric. (Thats a subtle one!)--Light current 04:50, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

This is where Catt's "electromagnetism" diverges from orthodoxy. Catt views current flow as "TEM" which is necessarily both electric field and magnetic field. The magnetic field is due to motion (as in a sense is the electric field in a TEM wave,) so he has to argue for continuous motion. The orthodox view regards the electric and magnetic fields that exist when current flows in a conductor as separate. Orthodoxy has no problem with the idea that in a charging capacitor, charge flows into the capacitor and comes to a stop, and in stopping the magnetic energy associated with the motion is transferred into the electric field. -- Kevin Brunt 23:19, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Kevin, the orthodox view on capacitor charging has been completely blown away by read Catts article on @diplacement current (and how to get rid of it). Even Nigel agrees with that!! So I dont see what point you are making in this post except that you realise that Catt is proposing reciprocating energy currents. Yes! I agree that reciprocating energy currents are one answer to DC situations as I have been saying for about 3 months now!--Light current 04:58, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Hi Light Current, it is hard to reply to your response where you put comments into the original reply instead of afterwards. You say: "Yes I tend to agree with the last part of the above paragraph. But are you not changing your story here?. I thought you said before that you can have radiation from one isolated conductor. I said you couldnt! However, your interpretation is I feel slightly wrong. Radiation does not travel from one conductor to the other, iit travels between the conductors as per well knoewn TL theory."

An isolated radio aerial can radiate energy. An isolated conductor connected to a charge (battery terminal) radiates energy as it charges up. It behaves like a radio aerial, and as the current varies in it, during charging, radio emission occurs. The current falls off rapidly along the wire because of this emission of energy. Hence you cannot transfer significant energy with a single wire. For a pair of conductors connected to the two terminals of a battery (Catt's anomaly situation) the current in each conductor is the opposite of the other, so the radio emission cancels out beyond the system, and no energy is wasted by radio -it all goes into the opposite conductor, so the two conductors help each out out. This is during the rise time portion of the TEM wave, see the illustration: http://electrogravity.blogspot.com/2006/01/solution-to-problem-with-maxwells.html

What you are talking about, Light Current, is the part of the TEM wave behind the rise at the front, and what you say about that part is fine! I'm concerned with Catt's anomaly, which is the front part of the TEM wave, where the current increase occurs. Thanks, Nigel 172.203.223.44 11:41, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

OK Nigel I think everyone should reply outside the body of others' posts. I'll start now. It would help though if the posts were kept shorter and deal with few points at one time. Rgarding your last post, yuo say

an isolated conductor connected to a charge (battery terminal) radiates energy as it charges up. However, this plainly cannot be the case as there is no return path for the current- unless of course the other end of the capaciance is connected to the other battery terminal. In this case you have a two conductor system and the capacitance must be taken into account in the analysis. BTW, charging a capacitor does not radiate energy, unless youre very unlucky! You then say For a pair of conductors connected to the two terminals of a battery (Catt's anomaly situation) the current in each conductor is the opposite of the other, so the radio emission cancels out beyond the system,

I agree with this mostly. In a coax of coarse there is no radiation at all-- Im not sure how much radiation ther is from a pair of open wires.

BTW you keep talking about a step as only having effect at that instant. Do a Fourier analyisis of the step to see what sinusodal components it contains! --Light current 14:27, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Hi Light current; (1) an aerial is a single conductor and does radiate radio as the current applied varies, we know a single conductor can't propagate a constant current because its inductance is infinite (which is a mechanism for Kirchoff's law), (2) if the capacitor is a transmission line, as stated before, the radio emission due to each conductor (capacitor plate) is the exact opposite of the other, and cancels out as seen from a distance. What I'm saying is that to resolve the Catt anomaly the TEM wave step needs to be analysed in two parts, first where the current is increasing (which is omitted from today's treatment), and second where the current is constant(which the current treatment does describe, using steady magnetic and electric fields). If the current rise (step front) was vertical, "displacement current" there (however you think of it) would be infinite, and since "displacement current" is an invention by Maxwell to retain continuity of current flow across the vacuum, you would then have the paradox of a finite current flowing along one wire turning into an infinite "displacement current" across the vacuum and then returning to a finite displacement current in the other wire. The true rise is not vertical, because the current does not rise from 0 to i instantly at any point on a conductor as the step passes by. It can be very great. The standard treatment of radio shows that radio emission is proportional to the variation rate of the net current di/dt in a conductor. "Displacement current" is the radio exchange process where the front of the TEM wave in each conductor swaps energy by radio (or electromagnetic pulse, if you prefer to reserve "radio" for sine wave shaped electromagnetic waves, as Kevin does). The wires must swap energy across the vacuum to propagate; each one is inducing the current in the other one. This is why the TEM wave goes at the speed of light in the vacuum between the conductors. Best wishes, Nigel 172.202.0.92 16:17, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

An aerial/antenna is specifically optimised to transfer energy from the current flow in the conductor into a self-sustaining transverse electromagnetic wave outside the conductor. Capacitors and transmission lines are usually intended to avoid this sort of energy transfer. The error that creates the Catt Anomaly is Catt's assumption that the magnetic and electric fields associated with the flow of current in a conductor constitute a "TEM wave"; they do not for any definition of a "TEM wave" that conforms to normal physics usage. -- Kevin Brunt 20:12, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

"Displacement current" is the label used by physicsts to refer to Maxwell's correction to Ampere's equation which is needed to yield consistent results when the equation is applied to a volume of space containing only one of the two plates of a charging capacitor. It predicts that a changing electric field causes a magnetic field. Asserting that the "displacement current" somehow "completes the cicuit" is stretching a metaphor too far. -- Kevin Brunt 20:12, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

LC - Catt et al, Displacement current (and how to get rid of it) does not "blow away" the orthodox view. The article does not prove its claims. It merely demonstrates that when an open-ended TL is fed from a constant voltage through a resistance, the voltage at the input end of the TL approximates to that expected if the TL were replaced with a "point" capacitance equal to the total capacitance of the line, and that approximation is increasingly accurate as the resistance is increased, or the TL's length is decreased. The article does not dispose of charge because it explicitly uses the unit capacitance of the TL which is, by definition, the ratio of the charge to the voltage. Equally, displacement current is not disproved, because the authors are using a set of equations derived for the convenience of electrical engineers who don't have the time (and possibly the mathematical competence) to handle the partial differential equations that describe the voltage and current at an arbitrary point on a TL. The authors seem to want to pretend that they are using a set of equations based on experimental observation. In fact they can show that a transmission line behaves like a capacitor precisely because they are using the results of an analysis that starts from the assertion that a TL is a capacitor (or rather many capacitors in parallel.) -- Kevin Brunt 20:12, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Nigel to LC?

Kevin???(dont you mean LC), coax or a waveguide (for microwave frequencies) is used in many practical cases, but let's keep to the simple physics of a DC TEM wave step propagated by two straight aerial-like conductors, as the Catt anomaly uses. We get electromagnetic radiation (radio emission) from a net time-varying current in a conductor. If you have two such conductors, with each having an inverted form of the signal in the other, they exchange energy which induces the current in the other. But there is no long distance propagation of this energy due to exact interference, so the coupling is perfect. This is how the front of the logic step propagates: each conductor causes the current in the opposite conductor by simple electromagnetic radiation due to the time-varying current as it rises. Catt simply missed out this mechanism, and is now too prejudiced against the mainstream to back these facts. Best wishes, Nigel 172.203.152.63 23:18, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

LC to Nigel

Both Catts conductors are connected to the battery. Only one of yours is. Therfore yours dont do nothin man!(IMO) (Unless youre talking about electrostatic charge buildup on the lone conductor)- but there again there must be a return path for the current thro' the stray capacitance to the other end of the battery.--Light current 05:24, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

LC's comment on (Nigels reply to Kevin 25 Jan )

Nigel, you appear not to have heard of Mr Fourier and his famous Fourier analysis which says that any repetitive waveform can be represented by a sum of sine and /or cosine waveforms of appropriate amplitude. Now in your experiment, the square wave that you used would have a fundamental plus all the odd harmonics decreasing in amplitude proportional to the harmonic. So when you say 'the flat part doesn't do anything', strictly speaking, you are incorrect or your statement is careless.--Light current 05:36, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Actually, Catt's "TEM step" isn't a "repetitive waveform", which is part of the problem, since it confused what is going on at the step and what is going on either side of it. Nigel has muddled it further by introducing a radio transmitter, so we now have too many things going on at once. -- Kevin Brunt 22:32, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

The issue of one conductor versus two has some relevance, because when you stop to consider it properly a TL is merely a conductor with regular properties to make it more convenience to do theory with. A single isolated conductor is a TL, and a lot of what we've been discussing does not really require a TL at all. In fact, if you read the "Lynch IEE version" of the Catt Anomaly, it is clear that the inclusion of the vacuum-spaced transmission line is merely noise, and that all of Catt's "Southern" and "Western" obfuscation is swept away, reducing the Question to "How can current propagate at nearly the speed of light when the individual electrons only move at less 1mm/second?" -- Kevin Brunt 22:32, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

When you connect a conductor to a battery, a voltage step propagates down the conductor. Behind the voltage step there is movement of charge - current flows and because charge has moved into a space that was previously uncharged, the charge with the volume of the conductor increases. There is a magnetic field and an electric field associated with the charge. For a TL it regularity means that behind the voltage step the charge remains constant at least until the step reaches the far end. Thus for a TL, ahead of and behind the step the fields are constant. At the step itself the fields are changing so, by Maxwell's equations, the changing magnetic field created an additional electric field, and vice versa. In a normal radio transmitter the antenna is excited by a sinusoidal signal, so that the fields around the antenna are deliberately not constant. Furthermore the antenna is "tuned" to maximise the field strengths at the right times to transfer energy into the desired TEM wave. The more the exciting waveform diverges from a pure sinusoid, the more energy is wasted. -- Kevin Brunt 22:32, 25 January 2006 (UTC)