Talk:Ivor Catt/Archive 15

message: Kevin, that was my first reaction: blame Catt's editors.  The late Tom Ivall was the overall Wireless World editor during the 1980s, and Martin Eccles was technical editor.  Martin later became the overall editor for a decade.  Tom was interested in publishing Catt as a controversy piece, while Martin was less keen but published a few of Catt's less political letters.
What you have to remember is that - assuming Catt to be right - you are dealing with a scientific revolutionary.  Imagine how difficult it would have been to do objective editing to Kepler's multivolume treatise of technical data back in 1609.  Kepler, just like Catt, mixed up genuine advances with mysticism.  In Catt's case the mysticism is the holy trinity of three vectors in the Poynting-Heaviside electromagnetic energy current.  In Kepler's time, he had mysticism treating the solar system binding force as magnetism, and having the musical harmony of the orbits, etc.  There was an enormous amount of rubbish in there.  Newton would have been given short shrift by Kepler (assuming Kepler to have had the personality of Catt).  Catt complains loudly if you identify facts in his work, claiming his ideas should not be "partitioned".  He believes science is personality based, not fact based.
When I tried to identify solid facts in Catt's work and discuss them, he would shout me down and start talking of his friend, Professor Dr Harold Hillman's, suppression.  Hillman, biologist at Surrey University in the 1980s, "discovered" that when you place a sample in an electron microscope, it is perturbed by the effects of vacuum and electron radiation, etc.  So the results of the analysis are corrupted more than for the usual dying of a specimen magnified under a slide in an ordinary optical microscope.  Hillman then goes on to suggest the implication that nobody should trust results from electron microscopes.  Then he gets "suppressed".  Catt finds this exciting, and it is very similar to what Catt is doing with the "Catt anomaly/question ".  Of course the establishment can't use Hillman or Catt's objections constructively.  Science proceeds not by whinging criticisms of orthodoxy, but by advances.
Personally, I've never had any freedom of speech in my life, so I don't appreciate Catt's talk of this kind. I keep my statements tied to hard facts and still have problems making anybody listen to anything.  This isn't due to the size of the world's population since the ratio of media to suppressed people remains roughly constant (both groups have grown in size over the last century).  Catt seems to think suppression of something new proves we are now finally at the "end of the enlightenment," whatever that is supposed to mean.  This is a falsehood: Boltzmann killed himself in 1906  due to suppression: "In 1904 Boltzmann visited the World's Fair in St Louis, USA. He lectured on applied mathematics and then went on to visit Berkeley and Stanford. Unfortunately he failed to realise that the new discoveries concerning radiation that he learnt about on this visit were about to prove his theories correct.  Attacks on his work continued and he began to feel that his life's work was about to collapse despite his defence of his theories. Depressed and in bad health, Boltzmann committed suicide just before experiment verified his work. On holiday with his wife and daughter at the Bay of Duino near Trieste, he hanged himself while his wife and daughter were swimming. However the cause of his suicide may have been wrongly attributed to the lack of acceptance of his ideas. We will never know the real cause which may have been the result of mental illness causing his depression."
In fact, every radical advance is always suppressed, by definition of the word radical.  The only advances not suppressed are non-radical.  Quarks were radical, so Zweig's paper was suppressed and rejected, and Gell-Mann only published his paper in a European journal, not a major American one.  General relativity was NOT radical, nor was special relativity or quantum mechanics.  These were mainstream developments; Poincare, Lorentz and Larmor all published on special relativity equations before Einstein, also without suppression.  So Einstein was not one-man revolutionary, contrary to widespread perceptions.  Boltzmann was such a revolutionary, and paid the price by being attacked.
I think I was wrong to blame Tom Ivall and Martin Eccles for not editing more common sense into Catt's papers, and taking out error.  Physics is not an easy subject, and these editors have families and lots of other responsibilities than spending months on a single paper, just to be "rewarded" by some anger from Catt.  Far better to publish Catt unedited as a mess, or to reject him, than to try to improve it.  Then of course you are talking personalities, not science.  For all the political problems with say Nature or Physical Review Letters, at least they manage to publich some decent papers.  Ultimately, when the little people have clarified Catt's ideas, someone great in the mainstream may see it worth his or her while ($$££) to write a "professional" paper on the topic and try to get it into Nature or PRL to win a prize.  The various people already studying these things will be said to have been incompetent amateurs.
Catt is really in a position of say Rutherford when he had the first evidence for the nuclear atom i.e., evidence saying that the mainstream plum-pudding atom of Sir J.J. Thomson was wrong.  Rutherford did a lot of hard work to analyse the alpha particle scattering by gold foil, providing strong evidence for a small charged nucleus.  Catt however has not done the equivalent hard analysis (see ).  Catt is this month (on 26/28 May) celebrating 30 years of suppression of his major discovery.  But is it suppressed?  It has been published widely in Wireless World and on the internet.  It is not like the suppresson of Galileo.  Nobody in the "Establishment" understands what Catt is saying, apart from his silly insults and political type comments which are made by lots of people who don't understand maths.  So Catt is not in an analogous position to Galileo.  Also, Catt is not interested in physics much, and seems incompetent.
You can't discuss with Catt because when you mention either energy or momentum he interrupts and he says things like "it is weird that physics has BOTH momentum AND energy".  You then explain to Catt that both energy and momentum are conserved quantities, so they are not mathematical obfuscations or duplicating each other.  Then you have run out of time, and when you next see Catt he says the same problem again, which you explained before.  Clearly I'm not cut out to teach people about conservation principles, at least not people like Catt. I'm also happy with causal momentum, a spacetime fabric filling space and flowing around moving fundamental particles once you have put work in to overcome inertia and accelerate them to a given velocity.  I'm not so locked into empirical principles that I refuse to search for a mechanism.  Anyway, you cannot discuss physics with Catt.  Nigel 172.215.83.97 17:19, 8 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Nigel's resurfacing 

message: The most relevant part of a comparison between Ivor Catt and Ernest Rutherford is to note differences. Rutherford performed a series of experiments which yielded results that were inexplicable within the prevailing theories and he then came up with a new model that more nearly matched the observations. His model was eventually superceded because further experiments showed that Rutherford's work was not the last word on the subject.
:No!  Nuclear physics hasn't been superseded!  Also, Rutherford did mathematics, not the crucial experiments, which were done by Geiger and Marsden.  Rutherford's nuclear atom has never been superseded.  As a chemist perhaps you are thinking of Bohr-Sommerfeld atom, developed about 3 years after Rutherford's nuclear atom calculations?  Rutherford got the credit for the nuclear atom not for experiments but for carefully analysing the results and getting the paper past bigoted pro-Thomson (pro-plum pudding atoms, anti-nuclear atoms) referees!  I've recently been moving my interest from experiments to theory, because results of experiments don't speak for themselves.  You need to be a theorist to get them published, or you need a good theorist in your team. Hans Geiger, the experimentalist who got his hands dirty in the lab and actually got the nuclear atom evidence, is only remembered for his radioactivity counter nowadays.  Also, the Japanese had arguments about a nuclear atom as early as 1903, but nobody listened.  So they didn't get the Nobel Prize.  nigel 172.214.68.193 18:33, 13 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Conventional current (electric current) is defined as flowing the opposite way to electric drift flow, after Benjamin Franklin.  Don't worry too much about which way the displacement current is physically going, as it is not real charge anyway.  nigel 172.214.68.193 18:42, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

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