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http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/spiral2.pdf . Fascinating that the Wikipedia Thought Police prevent any editing of the main Article. Also they have removed all discussion of Catt's main work, electromagnetic Theory. Here they join forces with the IET and IEEE, who have blocked Catt for 50 years. Now Catt's em theory work is in the top Royal Society journal. [2] How long with they let this stay on "Talk"? - Ivor Catt, 9 November 2018 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A00:23C4:C27:6700:9DC0:6769:7DA2:DFBB ( talk) 10:25, 9 November 2018 (UTC)
Sir Clive Sinclair: "Sir Clive Sinclair talks on wafer-scale integration 1987", YouTube [3]. Does anyone have the exact date of transmission of this film? 82.21.58.162 ( talk) 18:26, 30 July 2010 (UTC)
Isn't it about time that opinion-based references more than twenty years old were deleted? How do we know that the distinguished entrepreneur Sir Clive Sinclair has not altered his views on this subject in the last 28 years? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Historikeren ( talk • contribs) 08:23, 3 July 2015 (UTC)
I have just been notified by a kind email from Liba (Ivor's partner) that Ivor is in Watford general hospital. She did not give details, but it is a serious problem, so if anyone wants to send a "get well soon" card, that would be a nice idea. I will hopefully be able to visit Ivor later today (will not get into physics arguments!). - Nigel Cook, 14 Nov. 07 172.143.140.135 11:30, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
Update: I took time off and visited at the hospital from 3-4.15 pm today, although I had to wait until 3.30pm to see Ivor Catt. Liba was there and gave some details. Ivor was admitted as an emergency case on 6 October and has been in intensive care at the hospital for about 6 weeks. He was in a coma for the first 3 days after breathing difficulties. He suffered pneumonia and has had a tracheometry so he cannot speak; he is currently on a ventilator and being fed fluids via intravenous drip. Apart from that, and some other infections he has picked up in hospital (which seems inevitable these days), he seemed fine, although was clearly in some discomfort from the need for the ventilator. He slept but had brief conscious spells with eyes open and alert. Liba told me that Ivor is more fully awake in the evenings. The staff at the intensive care unit were excellent, although apparently they cannot make a full diagnosis or give a prognosis yet (despite the 6 weeks of tests so far). Liba said that Ivor seems to have improved slightly, and so hopefully he will make a full recovery although at the present time his condition is still extremely serious although stable. From these few details it looks to me as if a full recovery will probably take several months, not just a few more weeks. - Nigel Cook 172.201.255.208 19:19, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
Ivor Catt 2.1.2020 I now identify sheer vicious behaviour by the Wikipedia Thought Police. Catt was dismissed by the Italian professors as having no significance since he was "usually" not published in peer reviewed journals. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x6611.pdf So I added a www address from the Royal Society's "fulsome references" to my work (as described by Howie https://www.iop.org/about/awards/hon_fellowship/hon_fellows/page_66276.html#gref. This was removed. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/yak.htm Ihttp://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/howie.htm Howie "came across his Phil Trans paper with its fulsome references to the work of you and your colleagues." Howie was previously head of the Cavendish.
Bm gub: You have vandalised the page by replacing facts from peer-reviewed publications with half-baked opinions, which don't reflect the facts. For example, you have falsely asserted that Ivor Catt grew in in Singapore, when he actually moved around the world as his father was transferred between RAF airbases, and this falsehood has been inserted because you haven't even bothered to check the facts.
Everything you write is ignorant lies or "errors". You're not revising the article, you're deleting all the referenced facts and replacing them with false drivel and personal insults, which are banned under Wiki rules anyway. Any changes you insert need references, and if you aren't expert in the subject of Catt (sadly cross-talk stuff is probably a long way from your PhD in electronic circuits), it isn't a good idea to delete the material you haven't heard of and replace it with personal insults and sneers about the person.
All the insults in your comment after the revert of your vandalism ignore the facts there on the page which you tried to delete. For example, key ideas you criticise were actually developed by Dr David Walton and Malcolm Davidson, and Catt was the activist trying to get discussion going inside the IEE and IEEE. Sometimes one of the censors of Catt pops up writing a letter to Electronics World or here on this Wiki page about Catt, claims he or she is a PhD expert or whatever, and then insists that Catt is self-praising himself and an egotist. That's no admissible really, it's contentless drivel which can claimed about many people. This is why the facts are more important than such opinions and insults, such as the fact that a lot of the work is not Catt's, and that his successful inventions built on the discoveries of others such as Heaviside, Dr Walton, Davidson, Mike S. Gibson, and several others.
The Wiki page is about the facts concerning Ivor Catt, not about your personal opinions or the fact - stressed in the original article - that his work is not mainstream. Your attacks on his work as being self publication are false since the science is actually the work of many others. If you have opinions, you are welcome to try to publish them somewhere more appropriate, such as in a journal if you can survive peer-rview. Then we can cite your wisdom here on Wikipedia!
Photocopier Photocopier 18:34, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
Photocopier, your comments above are objectively in violation of WP:CIVIL. Please read Behavior that is unacceptable carefully and please pay particular attention to No personal attacks. Also, please carefully read What vandalism is not. Regards: Alfred Centauri 20:50, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
Alfred: I'm making a response to vandalism, not an attack: many people's editing and referenced, carefully researched and checked information was deleted and replaced with some ill-informed opinions and insulting claims (with no supporting evidence whatsoever) about a "mainstream consensus" of authorities on Catt, which doesn't exist. There is no consensus because the only people in authority who comment on Catt make contradictory remarks: this is the opposite of a consensus. I was perfectly civil, I didn't call anybody a liar for making what are evidently hostile, personally insulting, misleading and possibly libellous false claims and unfounded assertions. However, the scale of the vandalism of the article was such that a civil, yet unequivocally worded, response seemed needed on this discussion page to explain that simply deleting a whole article and replacing it with some obvious fantasy based entirely on misunderstandings and complete ignorance (if not deliberate vandalism), was somewhat unhelpful. Photocopier 15:23, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
Wow. Photocopier, no offense meant. I thought the Singapore thing was implied in the previous version, and I meant to just reword it into standard encyclopedia bio style ("John Doe was born in X on Jan 1 1901, and grew up in Y" rather than launching straight into childhood anecdotes. Thank you for correcting the facts. How is "Ivor Catt was born in XXX but grew up on RAF airbases around the world; he and his mother narrowly escaped the invasion of Singapore in 1942."? Please reword it to your satisfaction rather than reverting and accusing me of bad faith.
Next, after taking a deep breath: I know that the following is not your preferred version of the article, but please tell me which point is factually wrong in this shortened account:
Catt's views on electromagnetism
Catt argues that much of mainstream electromagnetism is wrong: 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. citation needed He argues that capacitance and inductance are fictional, being artifacts of transmission-line effects in the devices; that displacement current is not needed to explain capacitor operation (a non-controversial statement). As opposed to normal current (flow of charge), Catt uses energy current to describe most effects. citation needed Catt illustrates this with the Catt anomaly. When a step electromagnetic wave travels from left to right in a parallel twin-conductor transmission line, he asks, "Where does the charge on the bottom (return) conductor come from?" He does not answer that question, but states that simply asking the question proves that conventional electrodynamics must be false. 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.
The main problem with Catt's views on electromagetism is that after exposing a few (real or imagined) faults of electromagnetic theory as generally understood, he has no convincing explanation for the whole of electrical science that exists without Catt apparently ever having noticed it. How would he explain radio waves? How would he design power lines to transmit power to his house and everyone else's? How would he design an electric generator? These are are all massive questions that still await an answer. Instead, Catt prefers to raise hypothetical questions about transmission lines, a well understood subject, without suggesting how the ideas could be tested experimentally; therefore he is ingored. The Poynting vector is of little significance: what we know about the Poynting vector comes through Poynting's theorem, a theorem involving scalars only. No scientific analysis can be done with Poynting vectors because the PV obeys no differential equation or boundary conditions that would allow a solution to be found. So anyone with serious intentions of achieving something of significance in electric science has no option but to use solutions of Maxwell's equations, because Catt's hypotheses are untested. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Historikeren ( talk • contribs) 22:58, 10 January 2015 (UTC)
Catt's views on 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. (De Morgan's Laws state that a "positive-logic AND" is a "negative-logic OR" and vice versa.)
Seriously, what part of this is misrepresenting Catt's views? Most of it is verbatim from your preferred edit. Next, for the criticism section, please give some detail on my revision:
Current status of Catt's ideas
The view of Catt's ideas by mainstream physicists is that his earlier work on digital logic circuits is of value, but his later ideas about electromagnetism are incorrect.
Because Catt's views have been expressed mainly in popular-press articles, self-published books, and on informal Internet forums, mainstream physicists view Catt's ideas, to the extent that they have heard of them, as pseudophysics. 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 and cannot make reliable predictions to compare to experiments.
Catt claims that there are some workers who are beginning to re-evaluate his ideas on the transmission-line representation of the capacitor in order to achieve better modelling of these components.
That looks pretty reality-based to me, Photocopier. It is a fact that Catt's views are expressed mainly on his webpages; that Electronics World and Wireless World were both an edited popular-electronics magazines, not peer-reviewed journals. It is a fact that Catt's views on the nature of electromagnetism are mostly ignored and rejected by the mainstream; Catt himself seems to complain about this, which seems to confirm it as a fact (even if it's a fact he doesn't like ... but "facts you don't like" are not to be excluded from Wikipedia; wikipedia is not advertising, is not a personal homepage.) Note, also, that the paragraph above does not disparage anything Catt may or may not say about circuit design, practical aspects of crosstalk, etc.. It simply reports the plain and simple fact that Catt is an outsider and that essentially all mainstream physicists disagree with him. Bm gub 14:23, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
Bm gub: you say "please tell me which point is factually wrong in this shortened account: ... 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. He argues that capacitance and inductance are fictional, being artifacts of transmission-line effects in the devices; that displacement current is not needed to explain capacitor operation. As opposed to normal current (flow of charge), Catt uses energy current to describe most effects.
Catt illustrates this with the Catt anomaly. When a step electromagnetic wave travels from left to right in a parallel twin-conductor transmission line, he asks, "Where does the charge on the bottom (return) conductor come from?" He does not answer that question, but states that simply asking the question proves that conventional electrodynamics must be false. 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."
It's completely unsubstantiated opinion, similar to your false deduction that because Catt was in Singapore when the Japanese invaded, he must have been brought up in Singapore.
You take lots of little bits out of context to make up a personal insult by misrepresenting the facts. First, look at Catt's page (taken from his major 1994 book, http://www.ivorcatt.com/1_3.htm and you will see the section "the electron" at the end concerning Catt's construction of an electron from energy current. Your claim that "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" is false since charge is a property measurable only as fields. Nobody has collided electrons harder than 90 GeV or so, nobody knows what "charge" is (Planck scale string or whatever), except for it's definition which is a "static electric field". Catt shows how a static electric field arises from energy current, and on the same page (higher up), he explains:
"a) Energy current can only enter a capacitor at the speed of light. b) Once inside, there is no mechanism for the energy current to slow down below the speed of light. c) The steady electrostatically charged capacitor is indistinguishable from the reciprocating, dynamic model. d) The dynamic model is necessary to explain the new feature to be explained, the charging and discharging of a capacitor, and serves all the purposes previously served by the steady, static model."
You then say "He argues that capacitance and inductance are fictional, being artifacts..." which is another nonsensical contradiction, because artifacts are real, they are not fictional! Catt shows that a mechanism exists for charge, for capacitance and inductance. He doesn't show these things are "fictional".
Next, you claim that Catt shows "that displacement current is not needed to explain capacitor operation". Again, this is not a contradiction of mainstream theoretical physics, where Maxwell's physical displacement current went out with the aether and in its place there is a mathematical law associated with the Yang-Mills theory whereby all operations in spacetime in fields that are too weak to cause pair-production (below Schwinger's E=10^18 v/m threshold for pair production) involve gauge bosons exchange, not an aetherial "displacement current". Since Catt's replacement for aetherial "displacement current" is light speed radiation, it's consistent with quantum field theory, unlike the old nonsense of "displacement current".
Then you claim: "As opposed to normal current (flow of charge), Catt uses energy current to describe most effects. Catt illustrates this with the Catt anomaly." This is completely false, because flow of charge has never been equivalent to flow of energy: they are two different things because charge carries negligible kinetic energy, and the energy is carried by gauge bosons (as I've just explained, the gauge bosons are same thing as the TEM wave or Heaviside energy current, they mediate the field). Consider the mass of the conduction in typical transmission lines, they are on the order of about 1 part in 2000 of the mass, and their drift velocity even in a 1 amp current is typically on the order 1 mm/s. So the energy carried and delivered (1/2)mv^2 is trivial. This has nothing to do with electron current. You are confusing the two things, and then claiming that Catt is replacing electric current with energy current. Catt has electrons in his theory, and obviously they will be moved where there is a gradient in the electric potential, so you're making up nonsense.
Finally, you say: "He does not answer that question, but states that simply asking the question proves that conventional electrodynamics must be false. The subtext of his argument here seems to be that ..."
Catt doesn't state that "asking the question proves that conventional electrodynamics must be false", the question is an assessment of the degree of consensus and scientific discussion possible in electromagnetism between experts, and it is the answer he gets from experts which decides whether or not conventional ideology is helpful to a student who asks questions and hopes to get a similar answer from each expert. Professors asked by Catt, who he names and publishes, give different answers.
"The subtext of his argument here seems to be that ..."
You write this after making a false summary of Catt's question. So you make your own false conclusion, and then you write about the "subtext" to your own false conclusion. You are writing about your own personal ideas. This is your own opinion, which must be published in a peer reviewed journal before it can be mentioned here in a Wiki article about a living person. Thank you.
Further on, after more of this sort of personal insulting drivel based on your own opinions rather than on referenced facts, you write:
"Most of it is verbatim from your preferred edit. Next, for the criticism section, please give some detail on my revision: Current status of Catt's ideas. The view of Catt's ideas by mainstream physicists ..."
Here, you are giving your views and claiming to be giving a consensus by "mainstream physicists". You don't quite seem to be aware that mainstream physicists have contradictory views. If you read Catt's book "Catt Question", you will notice that there are two different views on a simple question. There is no consensus whatsoever. So all your writing on this page is insulting self-opinions, unsubstantiated by even a grain of evidence. It's rubbish, it's offensive, ... Photocopier 16:00, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/yak.htm is regularly removed from the main article on Ivor Catt because it undermines the defamatory peer reviewed article by the Italian professors that Ivor Catt should be ignored because he is not in peer reviewed journals.
I, Ivor Catt, here point out that the versions of "The Catt Question" which Pepper and McEwan replied to were identical. - Ivor Catt, 23 October 2009 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.43.106.70 ( talk) 17:26, 23 October 2009 (UTC)
I see that Photocopier has brought us back to the Catt Question/Anomaly, and the supposed disagreement between Professor Pepper of Cambridge and Doctor McEwen of Bradford. If you look at it properly, the answers they provided to Catt's Question are very clearly not in conflict with each other. What the two academics do not agree on is what the question meant. And the reason for that is entirely due to Catt's Question in the first place.
The Question starts
.... when a TEM step ....
(see The Catt Anomaly) Two paragraphs before this, Catt presents a paraphrase of the question
When a battery is connected to a resistor ....
Now the whole point is that Catt thinks that a flow of current is a TEM something. In this he is in disagreement with mainstream physics on two counts. Catt thinks that there is no flow of charge distinct from the flow of energy; physicists (including Heaviside) think that there is a flow of charge and a flow of current. Secondly, Catt uses "TEM" to refer to anything where the electric and magnetic fields and the motion are mutually perpendicular; physicists use the phrase "transverse electromagnetic wave" specifically to refer to a transverse wave (ie a wave that is oscillating in a direction perpendicular to the direction of motion) where the thing that is oscillating is a combination of the electromagnetic field.
The upshot of this is that whereas Catt thinks that the two versions of his question have the same meaning, they are entirely distinct questions when read by a physicist who applies the consensual meanings of the terminology.
Once you realise that there is a serious ambiguity in Catt's Question, it is perfectly clear that Prof Pepper (who was unaware of Catt's non-standard position) was trying to answer ".... when a TEM step ....", while Dr McEwen (undoubtedly a Wireless World reader) was answering "When a battery is connected to a resistor ....".
This is not a problem with the physics, but rather with Catt's Question. See Minor_characters_from_The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Majikthise_and_Vroomfondel Vroomfondel and Forty-two. -- Kevin Brunt 20:11, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
172.143.107.132 15:47, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
The experts are in perfect agreement about where the charge comes from - it is already in the conductor. It has been known since the start of the 20th Century that an "uncharged" mass actually contains vast (but equal) quantities of positive and negative charge, in the form of sub-atomic particles, and that the phenomenon of "charge" in the 19th Century sense is a statistical statement about the displacement of the particles from their equilibrium state.
In the absence of any additional context, Catt's Question appears to be about an electromagentic wave impinging on a conductor, which is quite clearly what Pepper's answer is about. McEwen, on the other hand, has not tried to answer the Question (and it is perfectly clear from what he wrote that it was not his intention to answer the Question.) Instead, (being very obviously aware of Catt's theories) McEwen has set out to explain how the "mainstream" consensus can accommodate the idea of near-light-speed propagation of a wavefront in a conductor with the millimetre-per-second drift velocity of the electron mass. Your "2 + 2" example is not helpful, or representative. A better one might be "What is the difference between an Apricot and a Tangerine?" which has different answers depending on whether you are referring to fruit or to obsolete British microcomputers.
RE: energy current... Let's start by noting that you mentioned the electron first. It is the discovery of the electron in 1897 and the evolution of the Drude model of conduction (and its quantum mechanical successors) that solves the dicotomy between "charge current" and "energy current". Catt's theories derive from Heaviside's 1888 publication (ie before the electron!) and it is clear that Catt does not really want to extend his theorising. Note particularly that Catt's Question only tangentially approaches the concept of the electron with the mention of the "drift velocity of the electric current".
I hold by my statement as to Catt's position, for which see The Death of Electric Current. Catt distinguished between "Theory N" - flow of charge + flow of energy (no attempt to explain why); "Theory H" (Heaviside) flow of charge + flow of energy (defined by Poynting Vector E x H) and "Theory C" (Catt) flow of energy.
Theories N, H and C appeared originally in Digital Hardware Design Chapter 10 and it is clear exactly where Catt's theories diverge from Heaviside's conception. At the bottom of page 65 (first page of the chapter) appears the quote from Heaviside that ends "We reverse this....." Now what Heaviside is reversing is not, as the following text would suggest, Theory N, but rather a suggestion by Maxwell that the flow of energy is the sum of the energies held in the electric and magnetic fields as they are carried through the conductor by the flow of charge. Maxwell is thus suggesting that there is no flow of energy distinct from the flow of charge.
Heaviside's "reversal" is a repudiation of Maxwell's suggestion. Heaviside requires both a flow of energy and a flow of charge. By invoking the Poynting Vector Heaviside automatically gets the magnitude of the flow of energy to be related to the vector product of the electric and magnetic fields, and thus proportional to the product of the voltage and current (which Maxwell's sum of energies simply cannot be made to do.)
When you look at Catt's detailed working of his theory, in Electromagnetism 1, chapter 1, you see that his energy current, like Maxwell's, is the sum of the separate energies held in the electric and magnetic fields. Catt's conception is the counterpart of Maxwell's; where Maxwell's energy flow is "in phase" with the current, Catt's energy flow is in phase with the voltage. Catt's version has the same problems as Maxwell's, and Heaviside would have dismissed as comprehensively. -- Kevin Brunt 19:59, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
Hello, I stumbled across this page. Having never heard of Ivor Catt, I have done a bit of reading and I'm inclined to make a major revision. Seeing that he has some fans here I would like to preempt an edit war. My credentials, in case they matter, are as a physics postdoc with experience with circuits, electron beams, ion beams, electron traps, etc. Here goes:
"Hello, I stumbled across this page. Having never heard of Ivor Catt, I have done a bit of reading and I'm inclined to make a major revision." - Bm gub.
So why has the revision not been made yet? removing the tittle-tattle would be a good start. Removing all the text which has no references would be a useful second phase. Removing all the text which has no independent references would also be a most valuable final stage. But would there be anything left? is there anyone interested in maintaining standards on here? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Historikeren ( talk • contribs) 16:29, 28 June 2015 (UTC)
Ivor Catt comments. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x46.htm — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.132.43.94 ( talk) 20:08, 14 May 2014 (UTC)
Hi. It's nice to have someone else here!
I've archived all the old discussion here as it really was irrelevant! To make sense of it you need to know that (towards the end at least) there were 3 participants in the discussion:
I doubt that I'm in serious disagreement with you about the overall value of Catt's writing. However, given that Catt's choice of venues for presenting his argument have largely prevented an accurate rebuttal being presented, there is a case for doing that here. The issue with the page as it currently stands is that it could do with vigorous sub-editing. There is excessive repetition and it does not adequately distance itself from Catt's POV. I would have said that the "Original Research" issue is something of a red herring, as the page is presenting Catt's opinions and conclusions; where it fails is in pointing out where Catt's opinions diverge from observed fact!
[Ivor Catt, 23 October 2009. Note the remark which occurs throughout my websites; "Riposte I make the commitment that anyone wishing to counter any assertion made on this site will be guaranteed a hyperlink to a website of their choosing at the point where the disputed assertion is made." - IC] —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.43.106.70 ( talk) 17:36, 23 October 2009 (UTC)
The problem really starts in his book "Digital Hardware Design", where the "stepwise" charging of a capacitor is first presented. This is done using the concepts of the characteristic impedance of a transmission line, and the velocity of propagation along it. There is no problem with the analysis; rather it is in the presentation of the formulae deployed as being somehow "fundamental", rather than deriving from the solution of the Telegrapher's Equations for an applied step waveform. Indeed, on page 14 of the book, Catt (et al) deny the derivation of the Tel. Eqns as the application of calculus to the delta V and delta I of the series L/shunt C representation of a finite length of a TL.
In fact, Catt argues that because he shows that "a capacitor is a transmission line", that it is "absurd" to assert the converse, that "a transmission line is a capacitor". I think that this is at the heart of the whole thing. Catt elsewhere talks about "causality". He appears to want to read the equation "A = B" as "A is caused by B", rather than the more neutral "where there is B there must also be A". Consequentally, by arguing that the current is "caused" by the magnetic field, he thinks that he is disproving the Ampere-Maxwell equation. -- Kevin Brunt 20:57, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
[Ivor Catt. 23 October 2009. See above, Kevin Brunt; "In fact, Catt argues that because he shows that "a capacitor is a transmission line", that it is "absurd" to assert the converse, that "a transmission line is a capacitor"." Catt never argued this, and in fact thinks the statement "a transmission line is a capacitor" is an equally valid statement. In fact, I told MayChiao, who said she was editor of Nature Physics, that the latter statement could be published, but the former could not. - IC]
In fact, the claimed equivalence between transmission lines and capacitors is spurious. They are different components with quite different behaviour in principle. One has two terminals, the other has four; but if one end of a transmission-line is unconnected, the other pair of terminals exhibits a pure capacitance only at zero frequency. The behaviour of the impedance of the transmission line with frequency is quite different at all other frequencies. This exposes the fallacy of the approach described in "The End of the Road", Electronics World April 2013. The behaviour of a capacitor is studied by making dynamic measurements on a section of transmission-line, following an assertion that the two are the same thing. The logical approach can be summarised thus: "Lemons and oranges are the same. My experiments on lemons lead me to believe that all lemons are yellow: therefore, all oranges are yellow". Capacitors are explained perfectly well in the real world by the concepts of charge and current, concepts which have changed history, but perhaps not within the small world of transmission-line theory. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Historikeren ( talk • contribs) 10:38, 13 July 2015 (UTC)
OK, there's the rewrite. Here's question number 2: if Catt is notable in the Wikipedia sense, why can I find no information about him other than his own Web pages? A Google search for "Ivor Catt" turns up page after page of links to ivorcatt.com and www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk, but virtually nothing---not even Usenet arguments---beyond that. Rather than saying Catt is "well known for his controversial approach", perhaps the article should say, in its entirety, "Catt was a circuit engineer of some repute in the 1970s. Today, he has a voluminous output of alternative electromagnetic theories, published via his own Web pages, where he reports on his arguments with mainstream engineers and physicists. " I see no evidence that he's even famous by crank standards in the manner of Tom Bearden, nor controversial by the standards of ... oh, I dunno, process physics. Can anyone turn up an article somewhere (other than crank.net or keelynet) actually about Ivor Catt, even for the purpose of saying "I got into an argument with Catt"? If not, I'm in favor of nominating this for deletion. Bm gub 18:19, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
There seems to be a reversion war going on between Photocopier and Bm gub.
Photocopier had reverted Bm gub's edits because Photocopier claimed they were "vandalism". This statement is incorrect; although Bm gub did rewrite the article, the rewriting is not explicit vandalism.
Here is Wikipedia's definition of vandalism (from Wikipedia:Vandalism): "Vandalism is any addition, removal, or change of content made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of Wikipedia.... Any good-faith effort to improve the encyclopedia, even if misguided or ill-considered, is not vandalism." The edits that Bm gub made, as far as I could tell, were good-faith edits. Therefore, I reverted to Bm gub's text, since Photocopier's rationale for making reversion was incorrect.
Photocopier claims that "Vandalism included the false unreferenced claim Catt grew up in Singapore". It's hard to see how this statement can be called "vandalism", however, I added a fact tag to this statement. Photocopier claims that bm gub removed "factual referenced material". The references for this material is primarily Catt's various websites and Catt's writings about his many theories; it is not material for an encyclopedia, and it's available in the external links for those interested. Finally, Photocopier claims "addition of insults contrary to Wiki rules". These putative insults appear to be the statement "mainstream physicists view Catt's ideas, to the extent that they have heard of them, as pseudophysics." This statement is correct, and in fact Catt quotes many times the fact that mainstream physicists dismiss his ideas.
Overall, Bm gub's rewrite makes the article concise; this seem to be the preferred text to me over the previous version, which had been an unsorted collection of unrelated claims Geoffrey.landis 14:19, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
Hello anon@92.2.217.251,
Please keep in mind, when editing the article:
I understand that there is a dearth of reliable sources: see, for example,
[6]
a google search which excludes all of Catt's personal web pages. It gets us to an extremely slim set of hits, ranging from parenting-forum posts to spam, with a bare smattering of comments from his supporters.
I am reverting your last slate of edits; please consider WP:RS and WP:FRINGE before restoring any of this material. Cheers, Bm gub ( talk) 22:41, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
I have come to the article from the Fringe Theories Noticeboard. I am going to take as neutral a stand as I possibly can in relation to Catt's theories, which I don't understand anyway, not having sufficient scientific knowledge. I have a question about the Views on digital logic section, though, arising from my high-school level of maths. How can Boolean Algebra "ignore" XOR, when it is Boolean algebra that defines this operation? Isn't it like saying that Arithmetic ignores division? Perhaps schoolteachers do not pay enough attention to teaching division, but that is a very different statement. Stating that systems engineers do not use XOR gates when they would be useful is a very different kind of statement from saying that Boolean Algebra ignores XOR. I am not sure which kind of statement Catt is making in the source that I found, as he assumes familiarity on the part of his readers. Could someone clarify? Thanks. Itsmejudith ( talk) 09:00, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
Catt's views on 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 XOR function in the product range. ( De Morgan's laws state that a "positive-logic AND" is a "negative-logic OR" and vice versa.) [1]
- [1] Unpublished letter to Electronics World, available on Catt's website [7]
Hi. The section on "Catt's view on digital logic" is, technically, my text. Light current lifted it from the discussion pages and dumped it onto the article. The main sources for it are his 1968 article in (IIRC) "Computer Design" (which was at www.ivorcatt.org, which seems to be offline) and his 2004 article "Boolean Castles in the Air" in Electronics World. Basically, in 1964 Catt lost the argument about adding an XOR IC to the Motorola ECL product line. This appears to have rankled and since then Catt has tried to prove his point. Put simply, although he claims to be a "logic designer" he seems not to understand the use of De Morgan's laws to "optimise" the equations that describe a combinatorial logic circuit. In particular, he seems not to understand that in order to apply the princples of optimisation, XORs have to be expanded into their AND-OR-NOT equivalent, as otherwise they become irreducible "knots" in the arrangement.
The final irony is that complex logic implementations are nowadays done in "programmable logic devices" which implement the AND-OR-NOT networks that Catt decries. To cap it all, the PLDs typically use an XOR gate at the "tail" of the network as a way of providing a programmable NOT.... -- Kevin Brunt ( talk) 18:08, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
Incidentally, Catt's page seems to have moved to this new website. Kevin, can you please check if the references you mentioned are available on this website ? Thanks. Abecedare ( talk) 18:38, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
All primary Boolean functions are symmetric Exclusive-OR is symmetric Therefore Exclusive-OR is a primary Boolean function
<deindent>
Thanks for the links, Kevin! My 2 cents on the two pieces
Although one unbalanced function plus the Inverter make up a complete set, a Balanced function (Exclusive OR) plus the Inverter do not. That is, some logic functions cannot be implemented using only Exclusive OR's and Inverters. So if a family of logic elements is being designed using only one type, then the NOR or the NAND, which em-braces both the unbalanced function and the Inverter, is the proper choice to make, and the Balanced function (Exclusive-OR) rightly will not appear in the family. If a family of logic elements is being designed using more than one type, it looks as though the Balanced function (Exclusive-OR), as one of the three primary logic functions, has a strong claim to be included.
While these opinions are now verifiable, I am not sure if they are really notable (in the sense, that nobody has even bothered to notice or rebut them) or worth discussing in the wikipedia article. What do others think ? Abecedare ( talk) 22:39, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
It was probably difficult to implement the Exclusive-OR with relays.
I moved the four books that were self-published by Catt to a separate subheading, in that Wikipedia:Fringe theories suggests that self-published works should be given somewhat lesser consideration. Can anybody find a reference to the work by Catt, listed as "The Two T.E.M. Signals", IEEE Computer Society, 1978, OCLC 35349268 ? I couldn't find any good reference to this, and the library search page of the IEEE Computer Society didn't have any listing for it. I moved it to the "articles" section, but I'm not sure whether it actually exists at all. It doesn't exist. Ivor Catt 5 6 2021 99.161.135.173 ( talk) 22:28, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
Vandals are watching this page. When I clean it up, they reverse it within hours. Who are the vandals controlling it and watching it? I did research this a few years ago, but stopped putting time into it. Getting rid of all my electromagnetic theory on the "Article" page was ludicrous. There is "Fulsome praise" for my em theory in the Royal Society Trans A journal, according to Howie CBE, late head of the Cavendish. but all my em theory is removed from this article on Catt. - Ivor Catt ivorcatt.co.uk/yak.htm Will this be removed? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A00:23C4:C0A:900:9594:5B81:E4B1:EDBA ( talk) 21:32, 9 June 2019 (UTC)
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http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/spiral2.pdf . Fascinating that the Wikipedia Thought Police prevent any editing of the main Article. Also they have removed all discussion of Catt's main work, electromagnetic Theory. Here they join forces with the IET and IEEE, who have blocked Catt for 50 years. Now Catt's em theory work is in the top Royal Society journal. [2] How long with they let this stay on "Talk"? - Ivor Catt, 9 November 2018 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A00:23C4:C27:6700:9DC0:6769:7DA2:DFBB ( talk) 10:25, 9 November 2018 (UTC)
Sir Clive Sinclair: "Sir Clive Sinclair talks on wafer-scale integration 1987", YouTube [3]. Does anyone have the exact date of transmission of this film? 82.21.58.162 ( talk) 18:26, 30 July 2010 (UTC)
Isn't it about time that opinion-based references more than twenty years old were deleted? How do we know that the distinguished entrepreneur Sir Clive Sinclair has not altered his views on this subject in the last 28 years? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Historikeren ( talk • contribs) 08:23, 3 July 2015 (UTC)
I have just been notified by a kind email from Liba (Ivor's partner) that Ivor is in Watford general hospital. She did not give details, but it is a serious problem, so if anyone wants to send a "get well soon" card, that would be a nice idea. I will hopefully be able to visit Ivor later today (will not get into physics arguments!). - Nigel Cook, 14 Nov. 07 172.143.140.135 11:30, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
Update: I took time off and visited at the hospital from 3-4.15 pm today, although I had to wait until 3.30pm to see Ivor Catt. Liba was there and gave some details. Ivor was admitted as an emergency case on 6 October and has been in intensive care at the hospital for about 6 weeks. He was in a coma for the first 3 days after breathing difficulties. He suffered pneumonia and has had a tracheometry so he cannot speak; he is currently on a ventilator and being fed fluids via intravenous drip. Apart from that, and some other infections he has picked up in hospital (which seems inevitable these days), he seemed fine, although was clearly in some discomfort from the need for the ventilator. He slept but had brief conscious spells with eyes open and alert. Liba told me that Ivor is more fully awake in the evenings. The staff at the intensive care unit were excellent, although apparently they cannot make a full diagnosis or give a prognosis yet (despite the 6 weeks of tests so far). Liba said that Ivor seems to have improved slightly, and so hopefully he will make a full recovery although at the present time his condition is still extremely serious although stable. From these few details it looks to me as if a full recovery will probably take several months, not just a few more weeks. - Nigel Cook 172.201.255.208 19:19, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
Ivor Catt 2.1.2020 I now identify sheer vicious behaviour by the Wikipedia Thought Police. Catt was dismissed by the Italian professors as having no significance since he was "usually" not published in peer reviewed journals. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x6611.pdf So I added a www address from the Royal Society's "fulsome references" to my work (as described by Howie https://www.iop.org/about/awards/hon_fellowship/hon_fellows/page_66276.html#gref. This was removed. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/yak.htm Ihttp://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/howie.htm Howie "came across his Phil Trans paper with its fulsome references to the work of you and your colleagues." Howie was previously head of the Cavendish.
Bm gub: You have vandalised the page by replacing facts from peer-reviewed publications with half-baked opinions, which don't reflect the facts. For example, you have falsely asserted that Ivor Catt grew in in Singapore, when he actually moved around the world as his father was transferred between RAF airbases, and this falsehood has been inserted because you haven't even bothered to check the facts.
Everything you write is ignorant lies or "errors". You're not revising the article, you're deleting all the referenced facts and replacing them with false drivel and personal insults, which are banned under Wiki rules anyway. Any changes you insert need references, and if you aren't expert in the subject of Catt (sadly cross-talk stuff is probably a long way from your PhD in electronic circuits), it isn't a good idea to delete the material you haven't heard of and replace it with personal insults and sneers about the person.
All the insults in your comment after the revert of your vandalism ignore the facts there on the page which you tried to delete. For example, key ideas you criticise were actually developed by Dr David Walton and Malcolm Davidson, and Catt was the activist trying to get discussion going inside the IEE and IEEE. Sometimes one of the censors of Catt pops up writing a letter to Electronics World or here on this Wiki page about Catt, claims he or she is a PhD expert or whatever, and then insists that Catt is self-praising himself and an egotist. That's no admissible really, it's contentless drivel which can claimed about many people. This is why the facts are more important than such opinions and insults, such as the fact that a lot of the work is not Catt's, and that his successful inventions built on the discoveries of others such as Heaviside, Dr Walton, Davidson, Mike S. Gibson, and several others.
The Wiki page is about the facts concerning Ivor Catt, not about your personal opinions or the fact - stressed in the original article - that his work is not mainstream. Your attacks on his work as being self publication are false since the science is actually the work of many others. If you have opinions, you are welcome to try to publish them somewhere more appropriate, such as in a journal if you can survive peer-rview. Then we can cite your wisdom here on Wikipedia!
Photocopier Photocopier 18:34, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
Photocopier, your comments above are objectively in violation of WP:CIVIL. Please read Behavior that is unacceptable carefully and please pay particular attention to No personal attacks. Also, please carefully read What vandalism is not. Regards: Alfred Centauri 20:50, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
Alfred: I'm making a response to vandalism, not an attack: many people's editing and referenced, carefully researched and checked information was deleted and replaced with some ill-informed opinions and insulting claims (with no supporting evidence whatsoever) about a "mainstream consensus" of authorities on Catt, which doesn't exist. There is no consensus because the only people in authority who comment on Catt make contradictory remarks: this is the opposite of a consensus. I was perfectly civil, I didn't call anybody a liar for making what are evidently hostile, personally insulting, misleading and possibly libellous false claims and unfounded assertions. However, the scale of the vandalism of the article was such that a civil, yet unequivocally worded, response seemed needed on this discussion page to explain that simply deleting a whole article and replacing it with some obvious fantasy based entirely on misunderstandings and complete ignorance (if not deliberate vandalism), was somewhat unhelpful. Photocopier 15:23, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
Wow. Photocopier, no offense meant. I thought the Singapore thing was implied in the previous version, and I meant to just reword it into standard encyclopedia bio style ("John Doe was born in X on Jan 1 1901, and grew up in Y" rather than launching straight into childhood anecdotes. Thank you for correcting the facts. How is "Ivor Catt was born in XXX but grew up on RAF airbases around the world; he and his mother narrowly escaped the invasion of Singapore in 1942."? Please reword it to your satisfaction rather than reverting and accusing me of bad faith.
Next, after taking a deep breath: I know that the following is not your preferred version of the article, but please tell me which point is factually wrong in this shortened account:
Catt's views on electromagnetism
Catt argues that much of mainstream electromagnetism is wrong: 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. citation needed He argues that capacitance and inductance are fictional, being artifacts of transmission-line effects in the devices; that displacement current is not needed to explain capacitor operation (a non-controversial statement). As opposed to normal current (flow of charge), Catt uses energy current to describe most effects. citation needed Catt illustrates this with the Catt anomaly. When a step electromagnetic wave travels from left to right in a parallel twin-conductor transmission line, he asks, "Where does the charge on the bottom (return) conductor come from?" He does not answer that question, but states that simply asking the question proves that conventional electrodynamics must be false. 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.
The main problem with Catt's views on electromagetism is that after exposing a few (real or imagined) faults of electromagnetic theory as generally understood, he has no convincing explanation for the whole of electrical science that exists without Catt apparently ever having noticed it. How would he explain radio waves? How would he design power lines to transmit power to his house and everyone else's? How would he design an electric generator? These are are all massive questions that still await an answer. Instead, Catt prefers to raise hypothetical questions about transmission lines, a well understood subject, without suggesting how the ideas could be tested experimentally; therefore he is ingored. The Poynting vector is of little significance: what we know about the Poynting vector comes through Poynting's theorem, a theorem involving scalars only. No scientific analysis can be done with Poynting vectors because the PV obeys no differential equation or boundary conditions that would allow a solution to be found. So anyone with serious intentions of achieving something of significance in electric science has no option but to use solutions of Maxwell's equations, because Catt's hypotheses are untested. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Historikeren ( talk • contribs) 22:58, 10 January 2015 (UTC)
Catt's views on 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. (De Morgan's Laws state that a "positive-logic AND" is a "negative-logic OR" and vice versa.)
Seriously, what part of this is misrepresenting Catt's views? Most of it is verbatim from your preferred edit. Next, for the criticism section, please give some detail on my revision:
Current status of Catt's ideas
The view of Catt's ideas by mainstream physicists is that his earlier work on digital logic circuits is of value, but his later ideas about electromagnetism are incorrect.
Because Catt's views have been expressed mainly in popular-press articles, self-published books, and on informal Internet forums, mainstream physicists view Catt's ideas, to the extent that they have heard of them, as pseudophysics. 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 and cannot make reliable predictions to compare to experiments.
Catt claims that there are some workers who are beginning to re-evaluate his ideas on the transmission-line representation of the capacitor in order to achieve better modelling of these components.
That looks pretty reality-based to me, Photocopier. It is a fact that Catt's views are expressed mainly on his webpages; that Electronics World and Wireless World were both an edited popular-electronics magazines, not peer-reviewed journals. It is a fact that Catt's views on the nature of electromagnetism are mostly ignored and rejected by the mainstream; Catt himself seems to complain about this, which seems to confirm it as a fact (even if it's a fact he doesn't like ... but "facts you don't like" are not to be excluded from Wikipedia; wikipedia is not advertising, is not a personal homepage.) Note, also, that the paragraph above does not disparage anything Catt may or may not say about circuit design, practical aspects of crosstalk, etc.. It simply reports the plain and simple fact that Catt is an outsider and that essentially all mainstream physicists disagree with him. Bm gub 14:23, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
Bm gub: you say "please tell me which point is factually wrong in this shortened account: ... 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. He argues that capacitance and inductance are fictional, being artifacts of transmission-line effects in the devices; that displacement current is not needed to explain capacitor operation. As opposed to normal current (flow of charge), Catt uses energy current to describe most effects.
Catt illustrates this with the Catt anomaly. When a step electromagnetic wave travels from left to right in a parallel twin-conductor transmission line, he asks, "Where does the charge on the bottom (return) conductor come from?" He does not answer that question, but states that simply asking the question proves that conventional electrodynamics must be false. 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."
It's completely unsubstantiated opinion, similar to your false deduction that because Catt was in Singapore when the Japanese invaded, he must have been brought up in Singapore.
You take lots of little bits out of context to make up a personal insult by misrepresenting the facts. First, look at Catt's page (taken from his major 1994 book, http://www.ivorcatt.com/1_3.htm and you will see the section "the electron" at the end concerning Catt's construction of an electron from energy current. Your claim that "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" is false since charge is a property measurable only as fields. Nobody has collided electrons harder than 90 GeV or so, nobody knows what "charge" is (Planck scale string or whatever), except for it's definition which is a "static electric field". Catt shows how a static electric field arises from energy current, and on the same page (higher up), he explains:
"a) Energy current can only enter a capacitor at the speed of light. b) Once inside, there is no mechanism for the energy current to slow down below the speed of light. c) The steady electrostatically charged capacitor is indistinguishable from the reciprocating, dynamic model. d) The dynamic model is necessary to explain the new feature to be explained, the charging and discharging of a capacitor, and serves all the purposes previously served by the steady, static model."
You then say "He argues that capacitance and inductance are fictional, being artifacts..." which is another nonsensical contradiction, because artifacts are real, they are not fictional! Catt shows that a mechanism exists for charge, for capacitance and inductance. He doesn't show these things are "fictional".
Next, you claim that Catt shows "that displacement current is not needed to explain capacitor operation". Again, this is not a contradiction of mainstream theoretical physics, where Maxwell's physical displacement current went out with the aether and in its place there is a mathematical law associated with the Yang-Mills theory whereby all operations in spacetime in fields that are too weak to cause pair-production (below Schwinger's E=10^18 v/m threshold for pair production) involve gauge bosons exchange, not an aetherial "displacement current". Since Catt's replacement for aetherial "displacement current" is light speed radiation, it's consistent with quantum field theory, unlike the old nonsense of "displacement current".
Then you claim: "As opposed to normal current (flow of charge), Catt uses energy current to describe most effects. Catt illustrates this with the Catt anomaly." This is completely false, because flow of charge has never been equivalent to flow of energy: they are two different things because charge carries negligible kinetic energy, and the energy is carried by gauge bosons (as I've just explained, the gauge bosons are same thing as the TEM wave or Heaviside energy current, they mediate the field). Consider the mass of the conduction in typical transmission lines, they are on the order of about 1 part in 2000 of the mass, and their drift velocity even in a 1 amp current is typically on the order 1 mm/s. So the energy carried and delivered (1/2)mv^2 is trivial. This has nothing to do with electron current. You are confusing the two things, and then claiming that Catt is replacing electric current with energy current. Catt has electrons in his theory, and obviously they will be moved where there is a gradient in the electric potential, so you're making up nonsense.
Finally, you say: "He does not answer that question, but states that simply asking the question proves that conventional electrodynamics must be false. The subtext of his argument here seems to be that ..."
Catt doesn't state that "asking the question proves that conventional electrodynamics must be false", the question is an assessment of the degree of consensus and scientific discussion possible in electromagnetism between experts, and it is the answer he gets from experts which decides whether or not conventional ideology is helpful to a student who asks questions and hopes to get a similar answer from each expert. Professors asked by Catt, who he names and publishes, give different answers.
"The subtext of his argument here seems to be that ..."
You write this after making a false summary of Catt's question. So you make your own false conclusion, and then you write about the "subtext" to your own false conclusion. You are writing about your own personal ideas. This is your own opinion, which must be published in a peer reviewed journal before it can be mentioned here in a Wiki article about a living person. Thank you.
Further on, after more of this sort of personal insulting drivel based on your own opinions rather than on referenced facts, you write:
"Most of it is verbatim from your preferred edit. Next, for the criticism section, please give some detail on my revision: Current status of Catt's ideas. The view of Catt's ideas by mainstream physicists ..."
Here, you are giving your views and claiming to be giving a consensus by "mainstream physicists". You don't quite seem to be aware that mainstream physicists have contradictory views. If you read Catt's book "Catt Question", you will notice that there are two different views on a simple question. There is no consensus whatsoever. So all your writing on this page is insulting self-opinions, unsubstantiated by even a grain of evidence. It's rubbish, it's offensive, ... Photocopier 16:00, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/yak.htm is regularly removed from the main article on Ivor Catt because it undermines the defamatory peer reviewed article by the Italian professors that Ivor Catt should be ignored because he is not in peer reviewed journals.
I, Ivor Catt, here point out that the versions of "The Catt Question" which Pepper and McEwan replied to were identical. - Ivor Catt, 23 October 2009 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.43.106.70 ( talk) 17:26, 23 October 2009 (UTC)
I see that Photocopier has brought us back to the Catt Question/Anomaly, and the supposed disagreement between Professor Pepper of Cambridge and Doctor McEwen of Bradford. If you look at it properly, the answers they provided to Catt's Question are very clearly not in conflict with each other. What the two academics do not agree on is what the question meant. And the reason for that is entirely due to Catt's Question in the first place.
The Question starts
.... when a TEM step ....
(see The Catt Anomaly) Two paragraphs before this, Catt presents a paraphrase of the question
When a battery is connected to a resistor ....
Now the whole point is that Catt thinks that a flow of current is a TEM something. In this he is in disagreement with mainstream physics on two counts. Catt thinks that there is no flow of charge distinct from the flow of energy; physicists (including Heaviside) think that there is a flow of charge and a flow of current. Secondly, Catt uses "TEM" to refer to anything where the electric and magnetic fields and the motion are mutually perpendicular; physicists use the phrase "transverse electromagnetic wave" specifically to refer to a transverse wave (ie a wave that is oscillating in a direction perpendicular to the direction of motion) where the thing that is oscillating is a combination of the electromagnetic field.
The upshot of this is that whereas Catt thinks that the two versions of his question have the same meaning, they are entirely distinct questions when read by a physicist who applies the consensual meanings of the terminology.
Once you realise that there is a serious ambiguity in Catt's Question, it is perfectly clear that Prof Pepper (who was unaware of Catt's non-standard position) was trying to answer ".... when a TEM step ....", while Dr McEwen (undoubtedly a Wireless World reader) was answering "When a battery is connected to a resistor ....".
This is not a problem with the physics, but rather with Catt's Question. See Minor_characters_from_The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Majikthise_and_Vroomfondel Vroomfondel and Forty-two. -- Kevin Brunt 20:11, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
172.143.107.132 15:47, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
The experts are in perfect agreement about where the charge comes from - it is already in the conductor. It has been known since the start of the 20th Century that an "uncharged" mass actually contains vast (but equal) quantities of positive and negative charge, in the form of sub-atomic particles, and that the phenomenon of "charge" in the 19th Century sense is a statistical statement about the displacement of the particles from their equilibrium state.
In the absence of any additional context, Catt's Question appears to be about an electromagentic wave impinging on a conductor, which is quite clearly what Pepper's answer is about. McEwen, on the other hand, has not tried to answer the Question (and it is perfectly clear from what he wrote that it was not his intention to answer the Question.) Instead, (being very obviously aware of Catt's theories) McEwen has set out to explain how the "mainstream" consensus can accommodate the idea of near-light-speed propagation of a wavefront in a conductor with the millimetre-per-second drift velocity of the electron mass. Your "2 + 2" example is not helpful, or representative. A better one might be "What is the difference between an Apricot and a Tangerine?" which has different answers depending on whether you are referring to fruit or to obsolete British microcomputers.
RE: energy current... Let's start by noting that you mentioned the electron first. It is the discovery of the electron in 1897 and the evolution of the Drude model of conduction (and its quantum mechanical successors) that solves the dicotomy between "charge current" and "energy current". Catt's theories derive from Heaviside's 1888 publication (ie before the electron!) and it is clear that Catt does not really want to extend his theorising. Note particularly that Catt's Question only tangentially approaches the concept of the electron with the mention of the "drift velocity of the electric current".
I hold by my statement as to Catt's position, for which see The Death of Electric Current. Catt distinguished between "Theory N" - flow of charge + flow of energy (no attempt to explain why); "Theory H" (Heaviside) flow of charge + flow of energy (defined by Poynting Vector E x H) and "Theory C" (Catt) flow of energy.
Theories N, H and C appeared originally in Digital Hardware Design Chapter 10 and it is clear exactly where Catt's theories diverge from Heaviside's conception. At the bottom of page 65 (first page of the chapter) appears the quote from Heaviside that ends "We reverse this....." Now what Heaviside is reversing is not, as the following text would suggest, Theory N, but rather a suggestion by Maxwell that the flow of energy is the sum of the energies held in the electric and magnetic fields as they are carried through the conductor by the flow of charge. Maxwell is thus suggesting that there is no flow of energy distinct from the flow of charge.
Heaviside's "reversal" is a repudiation of Maxwell's suggestion. Heaviside requires both a flow of energy and a flow of charge. By invoking the Poynting Vector Heaviside automatically gets the magnitude of the flow of energy to be related to the vector product of the electric and magnetic fields, and thus proportional to the product of the voltage and current (which Maxwell's sum of energies simply cannot be made to do.)
When you look at Catt's detailed working of his theory, in Electromagnetism 1, chapter 1, you see that his energy current, like Maxwell's, is the sum of the separate energies held in the electric and magnetic fields. Catt's conception is the counterpart of Maxwell's; where Maxwell's energy flow is "in phase" with the current, Catt's energy flow is in phase with the voltage. Catt's version has the same problems as Maxwell's, and Heaviside would have dismissed as comprehensively. -- Kevin Brunt 19:59, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
Hello, I stumbled across this page. Having never heard of Ivor Catt, I have done a bit of reading and I'm inclined to make a major revision. Seeing that he has some fans here I would like to preempt an edit war. My credentials, in case they matter, are as a physics postdoc with experience with circuits, electron beams, ion beams, electron traps, etc. Here goes:
"Hello, I stumbled across this page. Having never heard of Ivor Catt, I have done a bit of reading and I'm inclined to make a major revision." - Bm gub.
So why has the revision not been made yet? removing the tittle-tattle would be a good start. Removing all the text which has no references would be a useful second phase. Removing all the text which has no independent references would also be a most valuable final stage. But would there be anything left? is there anyone interested in maintaining standards on here? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Historikeren ( talk • contribs) 16:29, 28 June 2015 (UTC)
Ivor Catt comments. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x46.htm — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.132.43.94 ( talk) 20:08, 14 May 2014 (UTC)
Hi. It's nice to have someone else here!
I've archived all the old discussion here as it really was irrelevant! To make sense of it you need to know that (towards the end at least) there were 3 participants in the discussion:
I doubt that I'm in serious disagreement with you about the overall value of Catt's writing. However, given that Catt's choice of venues for presenting his argument have largely prevented an accurate rebuttal being presented, there is a case for doing that here. The issue with the page as it currently stands is that it could do with vigorous sub-editing. There is excessive repetition and it does not adequately distance itself from Catt's POV. I would have said that the "Original Research" issue is something of a red herring, as the page is presenting Catt's opinions and conclusions; where it fails is in pointing out where Catt's opinions diverge from observed fact!
[Ivor Catt, 23 October 2009. Note the remark which occurs throughout my websites; "Riposte I make the commitment that anyone wishing to counter any assertion made on this site will be guaranteed a hyperlink to a website of their choosing at the point where the disputed assertion is made." - IC] —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.43.106.70 ( talk) 17:36, 23 October 2009 (UTC)
The problem really starts in his book "Digital Hardware Design", where the "stepwise" charging of a capacitor is first presented. This is done using the concepts of the characteristic impedance of a transmission line, and the velocity of propagation along it. There is no problem with the analysis; rather it is in the presentation of the formulae deployed as being somehow "fundamental", rather than deriving from the solution of the Telegrapher's Equations for an applied step waveform. Indeed, on page 14 of the book, Catt (et al) deny the derivation of the Tel. Eqns as the application of calculus to the delta V and delta I of the series L/shunt C representation of a finite length of a TL.
In fact, Catt argues that because he shows that "a capacitor is a transmission line", that it is "absurd" to assert the converse, that "a transmission line is a capacitor". I think that this is at the heart of the whole thing. Catt elsewhere talks about "causality". He appears to want to read the equation "A = B" as "A is caused by B", rather than the more neutral "where there is B there must also be A". Consequentally, by arguing that the current is "caused" by the magnetic field, he thinks that he is disproving the Ampere-Maxwell equation. -- Kevin Brunt 20:57, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
[Ivor Catt. 23 October 2009. See above, Kevin Brunt; "In fact, Catt argues that because he shows that "a capacitor is a transmission line", that it is "absurd" to assert the converse, that "a transmission line is a capacitor"." Catt never argued this, and in fact thinks the statement "a transmission line is a capacitor" is an equally valid statement. In fact, I told MayChiao, who said she was editor of Nature Physics, that the latter statement could be published, but the former could not. - IC]
In fact, the claimed equivalence between transmission lines and capacitors is spurious. They are different components with quite different behaviour in principle. One has two terminals, the other has four; but if one end of a transmission-line is unconnected, the other pair of terminals exhibits a pure capacitance only at zero frequency. The behaviour of the impedance of the transmission line with frequency is quite different at all other frequencies. This exposes the fallacy of the approach described in "The End of the Road", Electronics World April 2013. The behaviour of a capacitor is studied by making dynamic measurements on a section of transmission-line, following an assertion that the two are the same thing. The logical approach can be summarised thus: "Lemons and oranges are the same. My experiments on lemons lead me to believe that all lemons are yellow: therefore, all oranges are yellow". Capacitors are explained perfectly well in the real world by the concepts of charge and current, concepts which have changed history, but perhaps not within the small world of transmission-line theory. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Historikeren ( talk • contribs) 10:38, 13 July 2015 (UTC)
OK, there's the rewrite. Here's question number 2: if Catt is notable in the Wikipedia sense, why can I find no information about him other than his own Web pages? A Google search for "Ivor Catt" turns up page after page of links to ivorcatt.com and www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk, but virtually nothing---not even Usenet arguments---beyond that. Rather than saying Catt is "well known for his controversial approach", perhaps the article should say, in its entirety, "Catt was a circuit engineer of some repute in the 1970s. Today, he has a voluminous output of alternative electromagnetic theories, published via his own Web pages, where he reports on his arguments with mainstream engineers and physicists. " I see no evidence that he's even famous by crank standards in the manner of Tom Bearden, nor controversial by the standards of ... oh, I dunno, process physics. Can anyone turn up an article somewhere (other than crank.net or keelynet) actually about Ivor Catt, even for the purpose of saying "I got into an argument with Catt"? If not, I'm in favor of nominating this for deletion. Bm gub 18:19, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
There seems to be a reversion war going on between Photocopier and Bm gub.
Photocopier had reverted Bm gub's edits because Photocopier claimed they were "vandalism". This statement is incorrect; although Bm gub did rewrite the article, the rewriting is not explicit vandalism.
Here is Wikipedia's definition of vandalism (from Wikipedia:Vandalism): "Vandalism is any addition, removal, or change of content made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of Wikipedia.... Any good-faith effort to improve the encyclopedia, even if misguided or ill-considered, is not vandalism." The edits that Bm gub made, as far as I could tell, were good-faith edits. Therefore, I reverted to Bm gub's text, since Photocopier's rationale for making reversion was incorrect.
Photocopier claims that "Vandalism included the false unreferenced claim Catt grew up in Singapore". It's hard to see how this statement can be called "vandalism", however, I added a fact tag to this statement. Photocopier claims that bm gub removed "factual referenced material". The references for this material is primarily Catt's various websites and Catt's writings about his many theories; it is not material for an encyclopedia, and it's available in the external links for those interested. Finally, Photocopier claims "addition of insults contrary to Wiki rules". These putative insults appear to be the statement "mainstream physicists view Catt's ideas, to the extent that they have heard of them, as pseudophysics." This statement is correct, and in fact Catt quotes many times the fact that mainstream physicists dismiss his ideas.
Overall, Bm gub's rewrite makes the article concise; this seem to be the preferred text to me over the previous version, which had been an unsorted collection of unrelated claims Geoffrey.landis 14:19, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
Hello anon@92.2.217.251,
Please keep in mind, when editing the article:
I understand that there is a dearth of reliable sources: see, for example,
[6]
a google search which excludes all of Catt's personal web pages. It gets us to an extremely slim set of hits, ranging from parenting-forum posts to spam, with a bare smattering of comments from his supporters.
I am reverting your last slate of edits; please consider WP:RS and WP:FRINGE before restoring any of this material. Cheers, Bm gub ( talk) 22:41, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
I have come to the article from the Fringe Theories Noticeboard. I am going to take as neutral a stand as I possibly can in relation to Catt's theories, which I don't understand anyway, not having sufficient scientific knowledge. I have a question about the Views on digital logic section, though, arising from my high-school level of maths. How can Boolean Algebra "ignore" XOR, when it is Boolean algebra that defines this operation? Isn't it like saying that Arithmetic ignores division? Perhaps schoolteachers do not pay enough attention to teaching division, but that is a very different statement. Stating that systems engineers do not use XOR gates when they would be useful is a very different kind of statement from saying that Boolean Algebra ignores XOR. I am not sure which kind of statement Catt is making in the source that I found, as he assumes familiarity on the part of his readers. Could someone clarify? Thanks. Itsmejudith ( talk) 09:00, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
Catt's views on 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 XOR function in the product range. ( De Morgan's laws state that a "positive-logic AND" is a "negative-logic OR" and vice versa.) [1]
- [1] Unpublished letter to Electronics World, available on Catt's website [7]
Hi. The section on "Catt's view on digital logic" is, technically, my text. Light current lifted it from the discussion pages and dumped it onto the article. The main sources for it are his 1968 article in (IIRC) "Computer Design" (which was at www.ivorcatt.org, which seems to be offline) and his 2004 article "Boolean Castles in the Air" in Electronics World. Basically, in 1964 Catt lost the argument about adding an XOR IC to the Motorola ECL product line. This appears to have rankled and since then Catt has tried to prove his point. Put simply, although he claims to be a "logic designer" he seems not to understand the use of De Morgan's laws to "optimise" the equations that describe a combinatorial logic circuit. In particular, he seems not to understand that in order to apply the princples of optimisation, XORs have to be expanded into their AND-OR-NOT equivalent, as otherwise they become irreducible "knots" in the arrangement.
The final irony is that complex logic implementations are nowadays done in "programmable logic devices" which implement the AND-OR-NOT networks that Catt decries. To cap it all, the PLDs typically use an XOR gate at the "tail" of the network as a way of providing a programmable NOT.... -- Kevin Brunt ( talk) 18:08, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
Incidentally, Catt's page seems to have moved to this new website. Kevin, can you please check if the references you mentioned are available on this website ? Thanks. Abecedare ( talk) 18:38, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
All primary Boolean functions are symmetric Exclusive-OR is symmetric Therefore Exclusive-OR is a primary Boolean function
<deindent>
Thanks for the links, Kevin! My 2 cents on the two pieces
Although one unbalanced function plus the Inverter make up a complete set, a Balanced function (Exclusive OR) plus the Inverter do not. That is, some logic functions cannot be implemented using only Exclusive OR's and Inverters. So if a family of logic elements is being designed using only one type, then the NOR or the NAND, which em-braces both the unbalanced function and the Inverter, is the proper choice to make, and the Balanced function (Exclusive-OR) rightly will not appear in the family. If a family of logic elements is being designed using more than one type, it looks as though the Balanced function (Exclusive-OR), as one of the three primary logic functions, has a strong claim to be included.
While these opinions are now verifiable, I am not sure if they are really notable (in the sense, that nobody has even bothered to notice or rebut them) or worth discussing in the wikipedia article. What do others think ? Abecedare ( talk) 22:39, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
It was probably difficult to implement the Exclusive-OR with relays.
I moved the four books that were self-published by Catt to a separate subheading, in that Wikipedia:Fringe theories suggests that self-published works should be given somewhat lesser consideration. Can anybody find a reference to the work by Catt, listed as "The Two T.E.M. Signals", IEEE Computer Society, 1978, OCLC 35349268 ? I couldn't find any good reference to this, and the library search page of the IEEE Computer Society didn't have any listing for it. I moved it to the "articles" section, but I'm not sure whether it actually exists at all. It doesn't exist. Ivor Catt 5 6 2021 99.161.135.173 ( talk) 22:28, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
Vandals are watching this page. When I clean it up, they reverse it within hours. Who are the vandals controlling it and watching it? I did research this a few years ago, but stopped putting time into it. Getting rid of all my electromagnetic theory on the "Article" page was ludicrous. There is "Fulsome praise" for my em theory in the Royal Society Trans A journal, according to Howie CBE, late head of the Cavendish. but all my em theory is removed from this article on Catt. - Ivor Catt ivorcatt.co.uk/yak.htm Will this be removed? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A00:23C4:C0A:900:9594:5B81:E4B1:EDBA ( talk) 21:32, 9 June 2019 (UTC)