Talk:Ivor Catt/Archive 4

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)

text: 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)
thread_title:  More comments on Catt 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)

text: 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)

text: 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)

text: 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)

text: 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)

text: 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)

text: 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)

text: 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)

text: 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)
thread_title:  Charge movement or electromagnetic waves propagation 

message: 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.  "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  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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  Note from Nigel Cook: 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Letter to Catt