| More
.This web page has Ivor Catt's comments on his entry in Wikipedia,
which can be reached by doing a Google search for wikipedia + "ivor
catt"
"He received B.Eng. degree from Cambridge University"....Actually
BA, which converted to MA on payment of a fee of £6. Cambridge
did not have a B. Eng.
"His most recent challenge to the status quo in electromagnetism
is called "The Catt anomaly"." .... Now called "The
Catt Question"
"Early life and family history
Ivor Catt in 1942, aged 7, was in Singapore when the Japanese began
their invasion. He was on one of the last four boats to leave (two
of which were sunk) while the Japanese were doing their preliminary
bombardment. His father, Sydney
[Ernest] Catt , was in charge of electronics on the RAF airbase,
and was captured and made a POW. His mother (Enid Mary Carr nee Jones)
won the top honors in mathematics from Royal Holloway College, London
University. Ivor Catt won a scholarship to read mathematics at Trinity
College, Cambridge University, but transferred to engineering."
.... Ivor was aged 6. He left Singapore two weeks before it fell to
the Japanese. Our two boats left, and then the last two (one of which
was sunk) left Singapore. This information about escaping boats is
in my memory, and I have not read documents about it. Enid Mary Catt
(nee Jones) gained the Lubbock Prize for Applied Mathematics in London
University in 1924 when aged 20, and also excelled in 1925. At age
17, Ivor Catt won a State Scholarship (there were 2,000 that year),
which helped him to get into Trinity
. "The first known article by Ivor Catt explaining his controversial
ideas on electromagnetics was published in the British magazine Wireless
World in 1978," .... "Displacement
Current"
"Another part of Catt's thinking on capacitors was that they
do not contain any internal ESL and that the ESR quoted by manufacturers
is simply the characteristic impedance of the TL formed by the capacitor
plates." .... This is muddled. The term ESL was unknown to me
until today (21feb07). Catt has never made an assertion about ESR.
As to ESL, Catt says that the series inductance of a capacitor (now
apparently called ESL) is no more than the loop inductance of the
capacitor's leads. ESR and ESL have nothing to do with the characteristic
impedance presented by the parallel capacitor plates.
"Nature of the electron
Catt suggests that the electron is a standing wave or trapped Heaviside
energy current. Ivor Catt found problems with Maxwell's view but solved
them by proving that a pair of wires is a capacitor, in IEEE Trans.
EC-16, 1967, and Proc. IEE, June 83 & June 87, also in book Digital
Hardware Design, Macmillan 1979 now free on line at [8]" ....
Untrue. Catt only speculates on the nature of the electron once, in
his on-line book Electromagnetics
1 , under the title "The electron". This develops from
charging two concentric spheres and then changing their radius to
zero and infinity. Speculative. Speculation about gravity follows.
As to "a pair of wires in a capacitor", that comment is
strange.
"he concludes that charge is gravitationally trapped energy
current or flow of energy." .... Untrue. I merely speculate that
the electron
, if it exists, may be formed by a localised vortex of TEM Waves.
"except as a slow, resistive, drift in response to the energy-carrying
light speed Heaviside energy current." .... This false caveat
should be removed. Then what went before becomes correct.
"The electric field carrying the energy precedes and causes
subsequent electron drift current, but the field is not itself charge,
but rather Heaviside "energy current", light speed electromagnetic
energy." Untrue. Catt does not have any electron current. His
"Theory C" is that when battery lights lamp, "electron
.... current" is not involved.
"To prove this, Catt charged up objects of length x through
a resistor to v volts and measured the discharge, which was a pulse
2x/c seconds long at v/2 volts." Catt did not prove this. He
merely recommends reading the application note for the Tektronix 109
Reed Relay Pulse Generator, which states that a one metre coax charged
up to 10v delivers a pulse 2m wide and 5v high. (Catt here writes
from memory about the Tek brochure. However, Catt used this pulse
generator a great deal in the 1960s, and is very familiar with its
performance.)
"[edit] Electron spin
In March 1979, Catt, Walton, and Davidson published another article
in Wireless World. Catt claimed to have solved the paradox of electron
spin by saying an electron is a trapped Heaviside energy current.
His theory implies that gravitation traps the energy, like the bending
of light by gravity. He then predicted that the size of the electron
is then similar to a black-hole, far smaller than the Planck size
suggested by "string theory". To test this, the gravity
strength resulting from Catt's work can be calculated, and it appears
correct." ....The
March 1979 article does not mention electron spin. I never predicted
the aize of the electron, and I never discuss electron spin.
"He has then used any differing answers" .... A strange
way of describing developments
over "The Catt Question". After having all attempts to publish
on fundamental electromagnetic theory rejected for publication for
thirty years by all learned journals in the world, Catt jettisoned
his own theories and asked to learn the classical theory which was
said to have reached perfection a hundred years before. His first
question was "The
Catt Question" . It took many years to elicit any reply whatsoever
from any accredited expert, but finally two such totally contradicted
each other. It is extraordinarily mealy-mouthed to describe the process
as "He has then used any differing answers to publicly lambast
all sides and to try to cause disharmony in the ranks and debunk completely
the foundations of currently accepted thinking on electromagnetic
theory." Does the Wikipedia writer really have no grasp of the
unprecedented, historic development demonstrated in the dialogue
with Lord Rees?
Ivor Catt 22feb07
@@@@@@@@@@@@@
Wikipedia on 21feb07;
Ivor Catt (born 1935) is a British electronics engineer known principally
for his controversial approach to electromagnetism. He received B.Eng.
degree from Cambridge University, and has won two major product awards
for his innovative computer chip designs (see Awards section below).
His most recent challenge to the status quo in electromagnetism is
called "The Catt anomaly".
....
....
Early life and family history
Ivor Catt in 1942, aged 7, was in Singapore when the Japanese began
their invasion. He was on one of the last four boats to leave (two
of which were sunk) while the Japanese were doing their preliminary
bombardment. His father, Sidney Catt, was in charge of electronics
on the RAF airbase, and was captured and made a POW. His mother won
the top honors in mathematics from Royal Holloway College, London
University. Ivor Catt won a scholarship to read mathematics at Trinity
College, Cambridge University, but transferred to engineering.
[edit] History
The first known article by Ivor Catt explaining his controversial
ideas on electromagnetics was published in the British magazine Wireless
World in 1978, although he had earlier written an article in New Scientist
about computing problems [1]. The Wireless World article discussed
the similarities between capacitors and transmission lines, and claimed
that all capacitors were, in fact, nothing other than transmission
lines [2]. Catt claimed to have discovered this based on his work
on high speed logic systems while working for Motorola, Phoenix, USA
in the late 1960s. Catt's own explanation of how he became interested
in this subject is shown below.
Illustration from the 1978 Wireless World paper (see Wireless World
copyright notes on image).I entered the computer industry when I joined
Ferranti (now ICL) in West Gorton, Manchester, in 1959. I worked on
the SIRIUS computer. When the memory was increased from 1,000 words
to a maximum of 10,000 words in increments of 3,000 by the addition
of three free-standing cabinets, there was trouble when the logic
signals from the central processor to free-standing cabinets were
all crowded together in a cableform 3 yards long. ... Sirius was the
first transistorised machine, and mutual inductance would not have
been significant in previous thermionic valve machines...In 1964 I
went to Motorola to research into the problem of interconnecting very
fast (1 ns) logic gates ... we delivered a working partially populated
prototype high speed memory of 64 words, 8 bits/word, 20 ns access
time. ... I developed theories to use in my work, which are outlined
in my IEEE Dec 1967 article (EC-16, n6) ... In late 1975, Dr David
Walton became acquainted ... I said that a high capacitance capacitor
was merely a low capacitance capacitor with more added. Walton then
suggested a capacitor was a transmission line. Malcolm Davidson ...
said that an RC waveform [Maxwell’s continuous ‘extra current’ for
the capacitor, the only original insight Maxwell made to EM] should
be ... built up from little steps, illustrating the validity of the
transmission line model for a capacitor [charging/discharging]. (This
model was later published in Wireless World in Dec 78.)’-
extract from Electromagnetic Theory Volume 2, Ivor Catt, St Albans,
1980, pp. 207-15 - [3]
[edit] Catt's views on electromagnetism
[edit] Capacitors and displacement current
Catt's work on equating capacitors to transmission lines came as a
result of his work in trying to provide adequate fast decoupling to
the power supplies for very fast (sub nanosecond rise time) logic
circuits at Motorola. He was apparently one of the first people to
realise that parallel power planes (in common use today) acted more
like transmission lines than capacitors. From this realisation he
developed his equivalence theory. Following on from this, 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.
However, the article is highly indicative and suggestive of stepwise
charging of capacitors [4]. Catt has championed the Heaviside case
of two conductors propagating a slab of energy current.
Another part of Catt's thinking on capacitors was that they do not
contain any internal ESL and that the ESR quoted by manufacturers
is simply the characteristic impedance of the TL formed by the capacitor
plates. These ideas have to some extent gained credence in the high
frequency modelling of chip capacitors, where the transmission line
model appears to give closer representation than the RLC model.[5]
[6] [7]
[edit] Nature of the electron
Catt suggests that the electron is a standing wave or trapped Heaviside
energy current. Ivor Catt found problems with Maxwell's view but solved
them by proving that a pair of wires is a capacitor, in IEEE Trans.
EC-16, 1967, and Proc. IEE, June 83 & June 87, also in book Digital
Hardware Design, Macmillan 1979 now free on line at [8]
[edit] Inductors
Later, Catt claimed (along with his associates), that inductors
too could be thought of as transmission lines. The derivation
is more complex than the capacitor case and involves consideration
of the "odd" and "even" modes of EM propagation
in an inductor. Catt claims to have proved the equivalence for one
and two turn inductors. It was peer-reviewed and published without
objection in Proc. IEE, June 1987. [Two articles. Proc.
IEEE June 1983 and Proc.
IEEE June 1987 .]
[edit] Transmission lines
Catt claims that most components act like transmission lines. He claims
that a charged transmission line is similar to a capacitor and says
that pulses become trapped inside open circuit lines travelling from
end to end at the speed of propagation in the medium. He agrees that
they cannot be detected but insists that they are there, based on
the argument that EM waves cannot be slowed down or stopped. Since
EM waves have been used to charge the transmission line, his argument
goes, they must still be present continually reciprocating (as he
puts it). From this postulate, and the one about no current or charge,
he concludes that charge is gravitationally trapped energy current
or flow of energy.
[edit] Energy current
As opposed to normal current (flow of charge), Catt uses energy current
to describe most effects. This is a flow of energy defined by the
Poynting vector (E×H). Energy current was originally postulatd
by Oliver Heaviside.
[edit] Charge
Catt does not admit the existence of electric charge as a fundamental
entity and he claims that all charge is composed of trapped Heaviside
energy current.
[edit] Electric current
Catt does not see the necessity of electric current (i.e. flow of
charge) for the transmission line energy delivery mechanism, except
as a slow, resistive, drift in response to the energy-carrying light
speed Heaviside energy current.
[edit] Copper as a dielectric material
One of Catt's latest ideas concerns his treatment of copper as a dielectric
material with infinite dielectric constant.
[edit] The Catt anomaly
The "Catt anomaly", relates to a parallel twin-conductor
transmission line. When a step electromagnetic wave travels from left
to right, he asks, "Where does the charge on the bottom (return)
conductor come from?" He proceeds to say that it cannot come
from anywhere due to the limitation on the speed of charge carriers
in the conductors or dielectric.
The subtext of his argument here seems to be that charge from the
conductors is not necessary for the transmission of EM waves in transmission
lines. The electric field carrying the energy precedes and causes
subsequent electron drift current, but the field is not itself charge,
but rather Heaviside "energy current", light speed electromagnetic
energy.
Catt in his article "Waves in Space", Wireless World March
1983, gives a clear experimental demonstration that the energy stored
in a charged object never slows down. Because equal Heaviside energy
currents are flowing in each opposite direction in a charged object,
there is no net magnetic field and no electron drift current or resistance
resulting therefrom. To prove this, Catt charged up objects of length
x through a resistor to v volts and measured the discharge, which
was a pulse 2x/c seconds long at v/2 volts. His explanation is that
in a static charge, energy is flowing equally in each direction. When
discharged, the energy already going towards the discharge point exits
first, while the remainder (initially going the wrong way) goes to
the other end of the conductor, reflects back via the bound end electron,
and exits subsequently.
[edit] Electron spin
In March 1979, Catt, Walton, and Davidson published another article
in Wireless World.
Catt claimed to have solved the paradox of electron spin by saying
an electron is a trapped Heaviside energy current. His theory implies
that gravitation traps the energy, like the bending of light by gravity.
He then predicted that the size of the electron is then similar to
a black-hole, far smaller than the Planck size suggested by "string
theory". To test this, the gravity strength resulting from Catt's
work can be calculated, and it appears correct.
[edit] Digital logic
Catt has a long-standing dispute about "exclusive-or" in
Boolean algebra. He has noted that "and", "or",
"exclusive-or" (and their inverses) are the six functions
out of the 16 possible functions of two Boolean inputs for which A
op B is the same as B op A. Catt calls this "symmetric",
and complains that Boolean algebra deals with "and" and
"or" and ignores "ex-or". He appears to have been
arguing this since his IC design days, when he apparently failed to
convince his boss of the business case for having an EXOR function
in the product range. In all this time Catt appears not to have seen
that De Morgan's Laws state that a "positive-logic AND"
is a "negative-logic OR" and vice versa.
[edit] Public arguments
[edit] Electromagnetics
Ivor Catt has achieved some notoriety in the British electrical and
electronics establishment by trying to get eminent professors in electrical
engineering or electromagnetics such as Dr Neil McEwan (Reader in
Electromagnetics, Bradford university) and Professor M. Pepper (University)
to comment on the Catt anomaly. He has then used any differing answers
to publicly lambast all sides and to try to cause disharmony in the
ranks and debunk completely the foundations of currently accepted
thinking on electromagnetic theory.
[edit] Electromagnetic compatibility (EMC)
Catt stated in Electronics World September 2003 issue, "EMC -
A Fatally Flawed Discipline" pages 44-52:
during the Falklands War, the British warship HMS Sheffield had to
switch off its radar looking for incoming missiles ... This is why
it did not see incoming Exocet missiles, and you know the rest. How
was it that after decades of pouring money into the EMC community,
this could happen ... that community has gone into limbo, sucking
in money but evading the real problems, like watching for missiles
while you talk to HQ.
This is confirmed on a recent official Ministry of Defence internet
site [9]: "Mutual Interference between the SATCOM and EW systems
onboard HMS Sheffield resulted in the inability to detect an incoming
Exocet missile during the Falklands war resulting in the loss of the
ship and the lives of 20 sailors." However the BBC report [10]
does not blame interference: "The Exocet missile is designed
to skim the sea to avoid radar detection."
[edit] Awards
Ivor Catt inspired the design of the world’s first wafer-scale integration
product, a 160 MB solid state memory in 1988, that won Sinclair's
spin-off, Anamartic, the‘Product of the Year Award’ from the U.S.
journals Electronic Design [11] (on 26 October 1989) and also from
Electronic Products [12] (in January 1990), after Sir Clive Sinclair’s
offshoot computer company, Anamartic, invested £16 million.
[edit] Support from Electronics World magazine editors and writers
Catt has complained bitterly at professional journals refusing to
publish his ideas and has effectively accused the establishment of
a conspiracy against him: [13]
Dr Arnold Lynch (who designed part of the first programmable computer,
that helped defeat Hitler and the Nazis) [14] supported Catt and corresponded
with Nigel Cook from 1996-2001, while the latter was publishing the
peer-reviewed journal Science World (ISSN 1367-6172).
In 1998 Lynch succeeded in pushing the Catt Anomaly into an IEE meeting
and publication: [15] In consequence, Electronics World editors Martin
Eccles and Phil Reed began publishing articles about Catt's work and
later Catt's own articles. The material from Catt's co-authors and
acolytes in Electronics World (such as Cook) focusses on the modification
to Maxwell's equations introduced by treating the capacitor as a transmission
line, and related errors in Maxwell's model for light, unified electromagnetism,
and so on.
[edit] War of words with New Scientist magazine
Ivor Catt has engaged in a war of words with the current editor of
New Scientist Jeremy Webb [16] and its previous editor [17].
[edit] Quotes on Ivor Catt
"Depending on who you talk to in the generally conservative semiconductor
industry, Catt is either a crank or a visionary. ..."
- New Scientist, 12 June 1986, p35;
"Ivor Catt [is] an innovative thinker whose own immense ability
in electronics has all too often been too far ahead of conventional
ideas to be appreciated..."
- Wafers herald new era in computing, New Scientist, 25 February
1989, p75[18].
"By virtue of his involvement, Catt knows all the ins and outs
of one of the major scientific scandals of the last 15 years, viz.
the systematic suppression in the world of electronics of all publications
about the phenomenon of the so-called glitch and its ramifications."
- Professor Edsger W. Dijkstra, Burroughs Research Fellow [19]
"There was a realisation in the mid 1970s that a capacitor was
in fact a transmission line ... Catt, attempting to bypass what he
felt were erroneous interpretations, based everything on those concepts
first proposed by Heaviside. The price that must be paid for this
is computational complexity as the treatment is distributed in space.
Nevertheless, his formulations of propagating TEM waves involve a
network which looks identical to what we now call a two-dimensional
series TLM mesh … Both Johns and Catt provide numerical modelling
systems which are based on the use of electrical networks to treat
electromagnetic analogues of physical problems. … The approaches of
Johns and Catt provide a firm basis for the rules that are applied
and once this is clear, then it is possible to intrude into that 'what-if'
land (what if we relax some of the strict electromagnetics rules?)
and research of this nature is in progress at this moment."
- Some insights into the history of numerical modelling, by D. de
Cogan, School of Information Systems, University of East Anglia, Norwich
NR4 7TJ, recent IEE paper: PDF[20], http [21]
The Sinclair team has developed the ideas of a British inventor,
Ivor Catt, who tried to get British firms to listen to him. On that
point this newspaper must admit to the British disease – we didn’t
have the bottle to write about Catt then, in part because the technological
establishment dismissed his notions. On the risk front, Sinclair has
tackled, via Catt, the fundamental breakthrough of the microchip business.
... A whole new range of opportunities for computer use come forward.
– Hamish McRae, The Guardian, 13 March 1985, p23
The Nobel Laureate Dr Gerardus 't Hooft, who won the prize in 1999
for work on electroweak gauge theory, stated recently:
Please remove me from this list. I don't want my in-box to be polluted
by all this nonsense about Maxwell's equations. The Maxwell equations
correctly describe the propagation of signals as well as the conservation
of charge in capacitors, period. Keep me out of any further discussions.
[22]
[edit] Current status of Catt's ideas
The view of Catt's ideas by conventional physicists is that his earlier
work on digital logic circuits is of value, but his later ideas about
electromagnetism are of no use. The scientific and engineering establishments
have generally declined to accept his arguments as being worthy of
discussion, since (in the view of conventional physics) a hundred
years of experimental work shows that Maxwell's equations are well
validated in the real world, and do not need to be "corrected."
In particular, the fact that Catt's views are not expressed in compact
mathematical form (Catt's view is that the use of mathematics in physics
is "skillful manipulation of meaningless symbols") means
that, in the conventional view, his work is out of the scope of conventional
physics. Outside of the mainstream of physics, however, there are
some workers who are beginning to re-evaluate Catt's ideas on the
transmission-line representation of the capacitor in order to achieve
better modelling of these components. His ideas on displacement current,
electric charge, electric current, etc. still have not been accepted
by mainstream workers.
Catt's view that electrons do not carry electrical charge seems to
be inconsistent with the well-observed physics of the operation of
such devices as the space charge limited operation of Vacuum tubes
or ion engines, the MOS field-effect transistor, the CCD array or
even the Cathode Ray Tube, or more modern devices such as Single-electron
transistors, all of which seem to be operate perfectly well using
physical principles that Catt discards.
[edit] Catt's associates/ supporters
Dr. D.S. Walton
Dr. Arnold Lynch
Mr. Malcolm Davidson
[edit] Publications and references
[edit] Articles
Displacement current and how to get rid of it ("how to get rid
of it" was put in without Catt's knowledge or consent by Wireless
World editor Ivall)
The history of displacement current. Catt, Walton and Davidson, Wireless
World, March 1979
The death of electric current (Catt shows that Heaviside energy current
carries the energy of electricity, and at light speeds it sets up
the field for subsequent electron drift)
The Catt Anomaly
Maxwell's equations revisited - A critique of orthodox electromagnetic
theory, Wireless World, March 1980, pp78,78
[edit] Learned Society presented papers
A Difficulty in Electromagnetic Theory By Dr Arnold Lynch and Mr Ivor
Catt Presented to, and Published by, the Institution of Electrical
Engineers, Professional Group D7 (History of Technology), 26th Weekend
Meeting, 10-12 July 1998, University of East Anglia, publication HEE/26:
I. Catt, 'Crosstalk (Noise) in Digital Systems,' in IEEE Trans. on
Elect. Comp., vol. EC-16 (Dec 1967) pp749-58. Also papers proving
that the inductor and transformer are really transmission lines like
capacitors, published in Proc. IEE, June 83 & June 87
[edit] See also
Twin capacitor paradox
[edit] External links
Ivor Catt's latest website, with 1970s books and articles
Ivor Catt's earlier website
Dr. Neil McEwan's explanation of "Catt anomaly"
The Catt Anomaly
Air Traffic Control report
Error in Maxwell's equations corrected using Catt's work
History of Maxwell, Heaviside and Catt theory
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivor_Catt"
Categories: 1935 births | Living people | British engineers | Electronics
engineers
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