|
Newly annotated version of http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/w4rlectu.htm
created in August 2003 |
|
“All professions are
conspiracies against the laity” (George Bernard-Shaw) is another aspect of
the problem(s). South
Place Ethical Society Conway Hall
Humanist Centre 25 Red
Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL ( 0171
831 7723 THE
POLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE Ivor Catt Lecture to the Ethical Society, 24 March 1996
Published in The Ethical Record, June 1996. Tel. 0171 831 7723 In a
letter in Wireless World, Nov. 1981, J.L. Linsley
Hood writes that "censorship has been effective throughout my own
professional career....". He lists nine authors who could not have been
published anywhere else but in Wireless World. There
is usually no conspiracy to suppress heretical ideas. There is no need of
one, except in some specific instances, because as Charles McCutcheon wrote
in the New Scientist (itself a notorious suppressor, but not as bad as
Nature) on 29 April 1976, p225, "An evolved conspiracy" suffices. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x56k.htm
A
pivotal event in science was the Michelson-Morley experiment in the 1880's. I
ran into a discussion in the interval at the Royal Institution seminar to
celebrate the centenary of the Michelson-Morley experiment. An American who
was setting up an international conference on relativity discussed with Prof.
Kilmister, one of the lecturers, whether ether
buffs should be suppressed at that conference. He also asked how Harold Aspden should be dealt with. That is, he was discussing
how to suppress a specific dissident. They concluded that if ether believers
kept to Establishment mathematics they should be
allowed to put their case. The American, who told me that he was a born-again
Christian and had previously been evil, said that he regarded heresy in
science much as he regarded heresy in religion. More generally, suppression
in science results from fear that a new idea will obstruct the normal, calm
progression of academic career progress and research funding. Suppression
is the norm rather than the exception. Even Maddox, editor of Nature, who
gave the Ethical Society's Voltaire Lecture on 18th November 1995, now says
he is worried. Maddox says that suppression is increasing. The Daily Telegraph
of 1 May 1989 quotes him; "The epoch making
paper by Francis Crick and James Watson outlining the structure of DNA, which
appeared in Nature in 1953, would 'probably not be publishable today', Maddox
laments....". That is Maddox, the greatest suppressor of all, joining
the band-waggon of concern about suppression. With his track record, that is
mind-blowing. Scientists have successfully resorted to false authorship ( Theocharis
), and Lovelock, the inventor of "Gaia", said on radio that he
resorted to a false address to get into Nature. The
most interesting, and most destructive, aspect is the pandemic suppression of
advances relating to the AIDS epidemic. Other experts specialise in the
allied subject of fraud in science. Stewart and Feder lead this field. My
first publication on suppression in science was "The Rise and Fall of
Bodies of Knowledge" , published in The Information Scientist No. 12
(4), Dec. 1978, pp137-144, where I discuss some of the cases of suppression
which litter science. My article was re-published in my book
"Electromagnetic Theory vol 1", 1979, p. 117. All of the content of
that book is suppressed, including the point I raised at the Michelson-Morley
centenary seminar, asking about the apparent paradox in their experiment that
although Michelson-Morley pre-date wave/particle dualism, both wave and
particle have to be assumed at different stages in the experiment to suppress
anomalies. Central to the most famous experiment in science, there is an
apparent paradox which may not be discussed. Discussion of the paradox is
suppressed. This paradox was published in Wireless World in May 1995, and
there has been no reply. What we are talking about is massive, multi-level
suppression in science today. When I raised this paradox at the centenary
seminar, the speaker, Professor Kilminster, said,
"That has never been mentioned before". In the nineteenth century,
that would have been a remark of praise, but today it is a criticism. He made
no further comment. I was later disciplined by the chairman, but the other
lecturer told me; "Of course, that's not my department, because I'm a
mathematician, and I leave that to the physicists." Both the lecturers,
chosen for the honour of speaking at the centenary seminar, withdrew from the
matter. The M-M
apparent paradox has never been mentioned since, being suppressed for good
reason. To raise such questions, and there are many, is cheating, like making
your pawn move as a combination of knight and bishop in a chess match.
Science today is the manipulation of pre-agreed axioms and old knowledge,
nothing more. Further, the request for more detailed statements of the
axioms, as in my case with Michelson-Morley, is resisted to the death. Not
only are new ideas suppressed, but attempts to get the full description of
the old ideas, if they are threadbare, is ignored. They will not play their
own game of chess, let alone play your new game. Today's
science resembles the religious service, which should not be interrupted by
the raising of theological questions. I am
not a failure, not an outsider, and the insider-outsider dualism is the wrong
analysis. Anyone, for instance Dingle, who speaks out of turn becomes an
outsider in that context. I have had major successes, which I am now citing.
It is important to listen to people who have been successful in the system as
well as the failures. By any criteria, I have been successful. My work on Wafer Scale Integration,
described in Wireless World
July 1981, was always rejected for publication by all learned journals, even
though it attracted £16 million of funding and became a widely praised
product in the field. Of course, its suppression reduced the threat that it
would upset the research funding being received in their universities by
journal referees for their own approaches to Wafer Scale Integration. When an
article comes in, the editor sends it out to the accredited experts, who are
receiving the funding for their own approaches to Wafer Scale Integration.
They now had the job of understanding what I was talking about. Their best
defence of their own funding was to fail to understand my approach, which I
am sure they did. They did not recommend suppression of a perceived rival. They
suppressed some nonsense which they could not make head or tail of. The
resulting product came to market in the USA. It was featured on the front
cover of the journal Electronic Design,
25oct89, and won the "Product of the Year Award" from the journal Electronic Products., January 1990. In
spite of my track record, my new WSI invention, see Wireless World mar89, for which I
have worldwide patents, cannot be published in any learned journal. In a
letter in Wireless World in January 1983, I wrote that during 25 years of
work, I had never succeeded in publishing any of my work on electromagnetic
theory. This is suppression of another subject - scientific discovery, totally different from Wafer
Scale integration, which is invention.
This ban now extends to 35 years. However, we should particularly think about
the refusal
of the Establishment, when approached, to clarify the classical theory they
are teaching and researching. It is not just a matter of suppressing the new
theory. It is a matter of refusing to
explain the old theory when questioned on detail. We have a threadbare
Establishment defending a threadbare body of knowledge. I have a question,
about where certain charge comes from in the classical theory, and that
question is not answered. It is called The Catt Anomaly. My colleague Harold
Hillman believes that it was not an error to give it that name. The evasion
would have occurred however it was described. It is not my theory - nothing
to do with me. It is an elementary question about classical electrodynamics,
and the answer is refused, as you will see later. Professor Pepper FRS and his boss
Professor Howie FRS, Head of the Cavendish, disagree with each other on this
detail of their theory - on
where the charge comes from. They refuse either to discuss it with us, or with
each other, or to say that the matter is of no importance, or to say that the
matter is of importance, or to say anything at all, because Catt has arrived
in the middle of a cathedral service and started arguing with the preacher
about theological matters. The whole notion of asking for comment on
theological matters in a cathedral, thinking one is in a theological college,
is absurd. We are talking about an established religion here, and asking for
details of the Holy Ghost - "Where is the Holy Ghost?", or
"What do you mean by the Trinity?" - might be acceptable in a
theological college, although I doubt it, but it is certainly not acceptable
during a service in a cathedral. We are talking here about an established
religion, and Howie and Pepper are paid priests. Not
only are new theories ignored and suppressed. We also find that the
Establishment is nonchalant about its contradictory versions of old theory.
See for instance the co-existing, hopelessly contradictory versions of the
TEM wave pointed out by me in "The
Heaviside Signal", Wireless World July 1979, which has been totally
ignored. New knowledge and New
Knowledge What is suppressed and what may be
communicated? The major piece of knowledge has to be suppressed and the
minor piece of knowledge can be tolerated. Basil
Bernstein, Institute of Education, is one of the key contributors to the
model I am developing. He himself writes in Chinese, so he has to be
interpreted. Although his other subject is language, he communicates with
great difficulty. In his book "Class, Codes and Control", pub.
R.K.P., 1971, he wrote what can be interpreted as follows; Knowledge is Property, with its own market value and
trading relationships, to be administered and defended by those who are
living off that body of knowledge. The
central control of our culture in these fields is the university lecturer,
and what controls him is a slab of lecture notes. This slab of lecture notes
covers a particular section of a first-degree course, and each year it brings
him in sixty pounds for two hours of lecturing. Knowledge
is property. We can go more close in, to find that
piece of property, that set of sheets of paper, that slab of lecture notes,
which he wrote once, perhaps a very long time ago, and which will bring him
sixty pounds each year, pay his mortgage and impress his maiden aunts - the
maiden aunt is most important in his situation. It is his security and it is
his identity. He passed examinations in that block of knowledge, maybe only
very recently. That is
essentially Bernstein's theory. I have
the concept of new knowledge, which is harmless, and the dangerous new stuff is in italics. New
knowledge. Information is safe, or new, if it indicates a further section in
a second degree syllabus. He just has to write some
more notes and imbibe some more material. New knowledge. Information is definitely not tolerable if it would lead
to a change in an A level syllabus. New
knowledge cannot be allowed in today's system, today's body of knowledge, and
will be suppressed at all levels. This is totally predictable. We come
down to the interface between unacceptable, and acceptable, knowledge. If
some new information led to a change in a first degree
syllabus, that will be blocked. If it merely indicated a new section in a first degree syllabus, that is not new. That is not threatening. The Vandal "A
capacitor is a transmission line," (Wireless World,
dec78,) which is new, leads
to the destruction of the text books. Twenty years later, this fact is still witheld
from students. To think of the horror with which this fact is viewed, think of the Nazis
burning the books. The man who brings new
knowledge is a vandal, and should understand that that is what he is. He is
attacking the established culture, and the established culture will defend itself
against him, because he is trying to get the books destroyed. With this
concept, you will understand the dialogue between those who are living off a
body of knowledge and those who are attempting to develop it further, or in
his terms, attempting to destroy it and him. The
Establishment has a dilemma. The parasite knowledge broker is in the science
Establishment, not an accountant, because he wanted to push forward
knowledge. But he must suppress knowledge in order to survive. He must not
admit to himself, and even more to his wife, that he is a barrier to
progress; that in order to survive, and keep paying their mortgage, he has to
block advance in his field. That is where he is vulnerable. He fights an
increasingly desperate rearguard against new knowledge, because of this freezing
of the body of knowledge. The date I give for the freezing of the body of
knowledge is 1927, at the Brussels - Solvay Conference, which mirrors the
Council of Nicaea for Christianity. At Solvay 1927, the New Physics was codified
and dogmatised, against Einstein's forceful and recurring objections, see Gribbin in The Ethical Record of nov95. We are well into
it now, and the repercussions become more and more serious. Grattan-Guinness
said that the introduction of universal education, in around 1850, which
instituted the new class of knowledge professionals, meant that in the end
knowledge would be frozen. We have been feeding through this process, and
finally progress comes to a halt. It is
not necessary to comprehend a frozen body of knowledge. An Establishment
figure who is living off a body of knowledge remains expert in detecting
heresy, but as the decades go by he becomes
incompetent in the body of knowledge. In the end, that body of knowledge disintegrates,
and you can see them disintegrating today. If you discuss Modern Physics with
its practitioners, they will tell you that the depth of grasp of the subject
by its practitioners today is very flimsy. The whole thing is highly
vulnerable, so the PR and the window-dressing becomes more and more frantic
and bizarre, an example being Gribbin's lecture in
the November 1995 issue of The Ethical Record. As one who was employed for
many years in the U.S.A. and Britain to "design computer chips", I
know that, pace Gribbin's assertion, ".... the
standard version of quantum theory taught in universities [was
never]
used .... to design computer chips." The leading High Priest of Modern
Physics, Paul Davies, recently received the million dollar
Templeton Prize for contributions to religion.
We see today the merging of the science section with the religion section in
book stores, something unimaginable fifty years ago. The message is out, that
something is deeply wrong with Modern Physics, and the student uptake of A
level and degree courses in Physics is dropping rapidly. If you
pay professionals to maintain a body of knowledge, it will finally
disintegrate. But more importantly, a professional paid specifically to advance
a body of knowledge, will freeze it. Science
is international, so this problem is worldwide. Although the English are of
course the worst, all other countries are determined to copy our errors. The
Chinese will not leapfrog us. They will not take advantage of our errors.
They all want to follow behind. There is no way round this. They all want to
go through these errors. In particular, the Israelis will not exploit new knowledge, new inventions, in order to resolve
their security problems, because their scientists need primarily to find
their several niches in the worldwide science hierarchy. We now
go for the core of the problem. Paid professionals sit astride a body of
knowledge, trying to freeze it, trying to defend it against those who want to
rock the boat. Modern Physics is a kind of science which is most defendable
against new knowledge. The
professional knowledge broker resembles the Pope, using the apostolic
succession, rather than the fundamentalist Christian with his bible. The
professional knowledge broker, like the cardinal, opts for Authority via
apostolic succession rather than any written Authority which he may fail to
control. An extreme form of this is Lakatos, who says that a theory is a
research programme, thus trapping theories within the apostolic succession. Four
things coming from 1927 are diametrically opposed to classical science, but
are now mainstream Philosophy of Science. These professional scientists have
funded an entourage of Philosophers of Science who are opposed to the old
Philosophy of Science, but which sustains these professional usurpers. They
have reversed most of the fundamental precepts of science. The new principles
are; wave-particle dualism; the Uncertainty Principle; non-causality; and the
extraordinary idea that the observer corrupts the experiment. These are not
scientific in the old sense. A Frozen Discipline You can
read that electromagnetic theory was signed and sealed one hundred years ago,
and that there will be no further advance. So if a
college lecturer wants a quiet time, he migrates to electromagnetic theory,
copies and re-arranges old text books to form his new text book, and teaches
the ever more narrow and obscure body of knowledge which is today's
accredited electromagnetic theory. Einstein
emphasised the importance of the subject when he wrote; "The special
theory of relativity owes its origin to Maxwell's equations of the
electromagnetic field." (ed. Schilpp; Albert
Einstein, Philosopher-Scientist, Library of living Authors, 1949, p62.) At the
core of electromagnetic theory in the world today you find the Wizard of Oz,
a frightened little man who, under today's Philosophy of Science, which is
Instrumentalism, (see K Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, RKP, p100,)
believes that he should maintain the fiction that he knows what he is doing.
Under Instrumentalism, the only value of a theory is its usefulness. Now the
judgement of the usefulness of a theory is subjective, and you can be sure
that for a university lecturer, the usefulness of the theory is that sixty
pounds per year. Dingle and Essen Louis
Essen, elected FRS for developing the Caesium Clock, wrote to Nature that the
alleged confirmation of Relativity by the gentlemen who took Caesium Clocks
round the world by airplane was bogus because the caesium clock did not have
the claimed accuracy. Nature refused to publish, preferring the PC
'confirmation' of relativity to stand. Essen told me that Dingle queered the
pitch by making a mistake. Essen also told me that the Inst. Phys. broke its
contract with him to publish an article even after he had checked the
galleys. The Inst. Phys. also broke its contract with me to publish my
article which later appeared in Wireless World in March 1979. The Inst. Phys.
is riddled with unscientific PC - mania. The Catt Anomaly Dingle
wrote the book, Science at the Crossroads, pub. Martin Brian O'Keefe. He
discussed the Twin Paradox, a problem in Relativity. Half of the book
discusses his suppression, and the other half discusses the Twin Paradox. Twenty-five
years later, I am writing the book, The Catt Anomaly - Science Beyond
the Crossroads. When a
battery is connected to a resistor via two parallel wires, electric current
flows which depends on the voltage of the battery and the resistance of the
resistor. Also, electric charge appears on the surface of the wires, and we
concentrate on the charge on the bottom wire. In the case of a 12 volt battery and four ohm car headlight bulb, the
electric current is three amps and the resulting power in the lamp is 36
watts. Consider
the case when the battery and lamp are connected by two very long parallel
wires, their length being 300,000 kilometres. When the switch is closed,
current will flow immediately into the front end of the wires, but the lamp
will not light for the first second. A wave front
will travel forward between the wires at the speed of light, reaching the
lamp after one second. The wave front comprises electric current, magnetic
field, electric charge and electric field. Negative charge appears on the
surface of the bottom wire. All this is agreed by all experts. Below
is the version of the Catt Anomaly as it was presented to Establishment
figures including Pepper and McEwan. The Question Trinity
College, Cambridge, wrote to past members of the college including myself
asking for money to finance their expansion programme. They argued that
Trinity had been in the forefront of academic advance, and my money would
help to keep them there. I
replied that Trinity and Cambridge had for twenty-five years refused to
comment in any way on Catt's theories on electromagnetism, and for ten years
on the Catt Anomaly, a problem in classical electromagnetism, of which I
enclosed a copy (above). I suggested to Atiyah,
Master of Trinity, a mathematician, that he cause his leading expert to
comment. The result was the following letter from Pepper. I also include a
part of his later letter to my colleague Raeto
West, which clarifies his position; UNIVERSITY
OF CAMBRIDGE DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS CAVENDISH LABORATORY MADINGLEY ROAD CAMBRIDGE CB3 0HE From: Professor M.
Pepper, FRS June 21,
1993 Ivor
Catt, Esq., 121
Westfields, St
Albans AL3 4JR Dear Mr
Catt, As a
Trinity physicist the Master suggested that I might provide some comments on
the questions raised in your recent letter to him on aspects of
electromagnetic theory. If I
understand the position correctly, your question concerns the source of the
charge at a metal surface which by responding to the presence of the EM wave
ensures that the reflectivity of the metal surface is virtually unity, hence
providing waveguide action and related applications. If I
may restate the basis of your question, what is the maximum frequency of
radiation which is reflected? It is this parameter rather than light velocity
which is important. The solution lies in the maximum frequency response of
the electron gas, which is the plasmon frequency w p and is calculated in a
straightforward way. If light frequency is greater than w p then the electron
gas in the metal can no longer respond and the reflectivity tends to zero.
The problem you are posing is that if the wave is guided by the metal then this implies that the charge resides on the
metal surface. As the wave travels at light velocity, then charge supplied
from outside the system would have to travel at light velocity as well, which
is clearly impossible. The
answer is found by considering the nature of conduction in metals. Here we
have a lattice of positively charged atoms surrounded by a sea of free
electrons which can move in response to an electric field. This response can
be very rapid and results in a polarisation of charge at the surface and
through the metal. At frequencies greater than w p the electron gas cannot
respond which is the reason for the transparency of metals to ultra-violet
radiation. However for frequencies used in
communications the electron gas can easily respond to the radiation and
reflectivity is unity. If a
poor conductor is used instead of a metal, i.e.
there are no freely conducting electrons, then there is no polarisation, and as
you point out charge cannot enter the system, and there can be no surface
field. Consequently reflection of the radiation will
not occur at these low frequencies and there is no waveguide action. I hope
that these comments provide a satisfactory explanation. Yours sincerely, [signed] M Pepper cc: Sir
Michael Atiyah - Trinity College [Master] Mr. A Weir - Trinity College Telephone: 0223 337330 August
23, 1993 Dear Raeto
West, I write with reference to your letter of August 19. Your description of
the process is correct; as a TEM wave advances so charge within the conductor
is polarised and the disturbance propagates at right angles to the direction
of propagation of the wave .... .... Yours
sincerely, M Pepper The
portions of Pepper's letter which strike you as either too erudite for your
comprehension or else as drivel, are
drivel. Generally, he has copied out irrelevant slabs of material from text
books. This
was an exciting development. For the previous decade, all experts, when
trapped into commenting, had insisted that the charge came from the west, and
did not have to travel at the speed of light. Now we had an accredited
expert, writing under instruction from his boss, saying that the charge could
not come from the west, but came from the south. There
the matter rested for two years, until a group of mature, dissident Combined
Humanities undergraduates at Bradford University organised a week-end
conference entitled "What is Education For?" I offered to give a
paper entitled "The Politics of Knowledge in Science". This was
accepted, Kathy Symonds telling me that I served a useful function, because
apart from me they had failed to link up with science, and also because the
lecturers who asked to speak all turned out to be Establishment, which I was
not quite. This
was the second time that I became kosher for a short period in a university,
admittedly only Bradford, and so had more power to elicit rational comment on
science. As part of my presentation, I asked Kathy Symonds in advance to ask
the appropriate official to instruct the top expert to comment on the Catt
Anomaly. Here is her letter, and McEwan's reply. Dear
Professor John Gardner As part
of our program,. "What is Education For?",
we need comment from the accredited Bradford University expert on the subject
below. I shall be very grateful if you send me written comment before the
start of our seminar on 22apr95. Thank
you very much for your time and trouble [signed]
Kathy Symonds. P.S. I enclose an S.A.E.
for your reply. To
Kathy Symonds 20 April
1995 Phone
01274-384006 Dear
Kathy, John
Gardiner has passed this on to me - I think I can claim to be reasonably
competent to discuss it. To deal
first with the problem raised in "Catt's Anomaly", there is
definitely a correct answer, and it is just that the new charge required in
the one foot of cable DOES flow from somewhere to the left! The charges DON'T
have to travel at anywhere near the speed of light to do this! The
sentence that begins "Not from somewhere to the left ....."
is fallacious ... such charge would NOT have to travel at the speed of light
in a vacuum! The reason that the sentence cannot be grasped by those
"disciplined in the art" is because it happens not to be true!!! It
may be obvious to the untutored mind because they haven't had the theoretical
training to see why it is wrong. It is exactly at the point where the
assertion seems really obvious that you need to think most clearly to see
where the logical deduction is unsound - and perhaps this is where the lesson
for educators lies. The heart of the fallacy is as follows: (a) If
the voltage step originally at a transverse plane "A" on the
conductors moves one foot to the right to a plane "B" (indeed about
one nanosecond later) then it is true that a certain amount of charge must
have entered the portion of the conductors between A and B. What is not true,
however, is that any of the electrons that were in the neighbourhood of A
actually had to travel to B to keep up the wave! (b) The
charge that appears between A and B is required to be uniformly distributed
along the length between A and B. This charge really does enter at plane A -
so how is it possible that the electrons didn's
have to rush to the right at the speed of light? - I will now explain:- (c)
When the wires are electrically neutral, they are actually composed of vast
numbers of positive charges and negatively charged electrons in equal
densities - the total charge balances out. The thing we call the "charge
on the line", which is required to account for the voltage wave is
actually the unbalance between the two sets of charges. (d)
Imagine that, between A and B, you have 100 electrons and 100 positively
charged nuclei arranged uniformly in pairs along one foot distance. There is
no net charge. (e) Now
imagine that you push in one extra electron in at the left
hand side A, and you squash the electrons up a bit so that they remain
evenly spaced but now 101 electrons fill the distance that was previously
occupied by 100. There is now a total of one unit of "charge on the
line" between A and B, and, rather surprisingly, this unbalanced charge
actually appears to be fairly uniformly distributed between A and B. The
electron originally at A would only move about 1/100 of a foot as you
squeezed the electrons closer together, and it would have to move this
distance in the one nanosecond it took for the voltage wave to move from A to
B. The electrons further to the right would move even less. (f) If
you imagine that you did this again with a larger number of positive and
negative charge pairs - say 1000 becoming 1001, then as you squeezed in the
extra electron the one next to it would only have to move up about 1/1000 of
a foot in the one nanosecond - and so on. If you
go on increasing the density of available charges, you can easily see that
the velocities required of the electrons to produce one unit of unbalance
becomes smaller and smaller. (Also, the one unit of unbalance appears to be
more and more uniformly distributed across the one foot of distance.) It
turns out that when you "put the numbers in" that the real number
of free electrons in the one foot wire is colossal,
and that consequently they only need to move at walking pace or less! You can
summarise all this by saying that the "charge" that is required to
account for the voltage across the line is not produced simply by a small
number of charges moving in to the section of line but by a very slight
redistribution of a vastly larger number of charges that were already in that
section! Putting it in still another way again, there has been a confusion
over the identity of the charges that account for the voltage across the
line. You can
go on describing this problem at deeper and deeper levels and it will go on
revealing more and more interesting physics - which soon gets very hard. For
example, there is a quite noticeable effect because you do need some force to
keep the electrons moving against the collisions with the stationary atoms.
This appears as resistance in the line and it can cause the advancing voltage
step to become distorted, ie
it smears out into a more gradual step. At a
higher level of precision there is even a very small effect from the finite
acceleration of the electrons. As the voltage step passes over them, the
local electrons in the conductor are accelerated (very rapidly!!!) to the
very small speed that is needed. There is no paradox about the rapid
acceleration of the particles, they are very light. This produces an extremely
small effect on the velocity of the wave travelling down the line, but you
would not be able to detect it at the frequencies used in ordinary
electronics. I hope
this has helped and given you something to think about. The
"anomaly" is very instructive educationally, it is a real challenge
for the teacher to explain clearly, and a very good example of how fruitful
it can be to be wrong about something! Turning
more generally to your 2 - day event, I am extremely intrigued about how
"Catt's anomaly" came into the discussion. I do realise that
progress has often been made by challenging orthodoxies, but in the case of
Catt's problem I happen to think that the accepted theory gives a pretty good
account, but you can learn a lot if you are really made to set out how. I
would be very interested to hear what you make of my comments, and how they
have been used in your event. Best
wishes [signed]
Neil McEwan (Dr.), Reader in Electromagnetics [University of
Bradford] [Copy
typed by I Catt, 1oct95] McEwan
was the orthodox response that I had been waiting for. I had not previously
had it styled 'ex cathedra'; that is, stated by the accredited expert from an
institution (Bradford University), under instruction from the appropriate top
official of the institution (Professor of Electrical Engineering, Head of
Department). I was now in a position to approach the accredited learned
institution and ask them to help. This was a better chance to get rational
comment on scientific fundamentals than I had had during the previous quarter
of a century of searching. I had to tackle it in the best possible way, using
comprehension and techniques that had developed since Dingle's
day, as the whole of twentieth century science slid deeper into the
morass of its own careful devising. Here was the best chance to scientifically establish the facts about
today's science; possibly the last chance. I took
the Pepper/McEwan contradiction to the head of the IEE. Ivor Catt, 121 Westfields, St. Albans AL3 4JR, England (01727 864257 26may95; Second copy sent 27june95 Third copy sent 18aug95 Fourth copy sent 3sep95 The
Secretary, Institution
of Electrical Engineers, Savoy
Place, London. WC2R
0BL (0171 240 1871 Dear Dr. J. C. Williams, The
Catt Anomaly. An essential
component of classical electromagnetism remains unstated. There is
disagreement about this feature by accredited experts, Professor Howie FRS,
Professor Pepper FRS, McEwan Reader in Electromagnetics, but no discussion by
them to resolve the matter. Is the
IEE the accredited institution with a primary responsibility for
Electromagnetic Theory? How does the IEE proceed in a situation like this,
where the theory which is the basis for its raison d'être turns out to be
unstated and unclear? Yours
sincerely, Ivor
Catt encl. 21june93
statement on the Catt Anomaly by Pepper 20apr95
statement on the Catt Anomaly by McEwan apr95
Half page note from Symonds to McEwan plus description of the Catt Anomaly Catt
letter to Electronics and Wireless World, May95 Summary
of disagreement, or confusion, in classical electromagnetism, below. Summary of disagreement. "Dear Professor John Gardner, As part of our [Bradford university] program, 'What is
Education For?', we need comment from the accredited Bradford University
expert on the subject below" - Kathy Symonds, 4apr95. "[Professor] John Gardner has passed this on to
me - I think I can claim to be reasonably competent to discuss it.... ....
the new charge required in the one foot of cable DOES flow from somewhere to the left! The charges DON'T have to travel anywhere near the
speed of light to do this! .... It may be obvious to the untutored mind [plus
Pepper FRS] because they haven't had the [Bradford univ.] theoretical
training .... The [Catt] 'anomaly' is very instructive
educationally...." - Neil McEwan (Dr), Reader in Electromagnetics
[Bradford University], 20apr95. ".... As the wave travels at light velocity,
then charge supplied from outside the system [i.e.
from the left, or west,] would have to travel at light velocity as well,
which is clearly impossible. ....we have a lattice
of positively charged atoms surrounded by a sea of free electrons which ....
move in response to an electric field...." - Pepper, 21june93. ".... as a TEM wave advances so charge within
the conductor .... propagates at right angles to the direction of the wave.
...." - Professor M. Pepper, FRS., Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge,
23aug93. "Institution
of Electrical Engineers - to promote the general advancement of electrical
science and engineering and their applications, and to facilitate the exchange of information and ideas
on those subjects; 130,000 members. President Sir David Davies" [italics
by I.C.] - from p1557 of
"The World of Learning 1995", Europa Pubs. Ltd. As you
will see from the dating of my letter, the reply, from Williams' deputy, was
long in coming. I learned later that Williams and Secker were new men,
anxious to show more willing than their predecessors. This led them into the
quagmire. The new broom got stuck in old, sticky cobwebs. Dear Mr
Catt Thank
you for your letter of 18 August, to which the Secretary, Dr Williams, has
asked me to respond. Firstly,
I should mention that we have had your book reviewed and that the resulting
report will be published in the Electronics and Communication Engineering
Journal - either in the October or December issue. [Actually oct95.] The
Institution has a responsibility to 'promote the general advancement of
electrical science and engineering and their applications and to facilitate
the exchange of information and ideas on these subjects to the members of the
Institution'. The general view of the experts within the IEE is that the
so-called 'Catt anomaly' is not an anomaly at all, and does not, therefore,
require discussion or exposition. The favoured explanation aligns with the
statement to which you refer, attributed to Professor Pepper, namely that as
a TEM wave advances, so charge separation occurs close to the conductor
surface effectively giving a transitory current flow at right angles to the
direction of wave propagation. Yours
sincerely [signed] Professor Philip E Secker Deputy Secretary IEE 4sep95 Secker
was politically inept to admit that the IEE had a responsibility in this
matter, and in so doing he betrayed the forces of darkness. However, he
showed better obfuscatory tactics by introducing
the irrelevant question of the review of my latest book, which had been
hanging over the IEE for more than a year. (Up to that date, there had been
no evidence in IEE literature that Catt had ever contributed to
electromagnetic theory. Except for the belated admission, fifteen years too
late, of his contribution in another field, Wafer Scale Integration, Catt
remained a non-person. The reader can learn about all these matters in Catt's
may95 letter to Electronics World + Wireless World. Its present editor Eccles
has since turned chicken and will not publish anything more by Catt. [ "Mr. Catt returns" 2003] ) The
important point is that Secker wrote that his IEE experts had backed the
wrong horse, opting for Cambridge with its aberrant Pepper; producing charge
from the south from inside the conductor like a rabbit from a hat. The IEE
opted for prestige rather than for the more tenable explanation from lowly
Bradford; that the charge came from the west, and somehow managed to do so
even though it travelled too slowly. The IEE did not know that Pepper's boss
Howie FRS was a Westerner, or they would have gone for his revered Cavendish seniority,
and avoided the quagmire. The Westerner view could have been brazened out,
and had been for the previous decade since the discovery of the Catt Anomaly
in aug81, for instance in many letters to Wireless World. The ingenious but
mad Southerner view of Pepper could not. I now
no longer had to take sides, but only to get Westerners and Southerners to
resolve their differences, a
task which was to prove Herculean, as I expected. That is, I knew that the
forces of darkness in today's science were entrenched, strong and determined. Much
activity followed during the next few weeks, but first we should jump to two
further comments by Secker, to give a brief taste of what followed. Whereas
above, on 4sep95, Secker wrote "....The
favoured explanation aligns with the statement to which you refer, attributed
to Professor Pepper, ....", seven weeks later, on 25oct95, he wrote;
"Dr. McEwan really has the answer ....".
Thus, he was backing both the views whose contradiction was the cause of Catt
writing to Secker's boss in the first place, and his boss instructing Secker
to reply! Further, although on 4sep95 Top Dog in the IEE chose him as the
appropriate expert to reply, after seven weeks of repeated pontification and
obfuscation, Secker wrote on 26oct95; "I should explain that I am no
expert in the area to which the 'Catt Anomaly' refers....". He repeated
this claim on 19dec95. This earned the riposte on 15nov95 from Luca Turin,
lecturer in biophysics in London University; "To claim, as Professor
Secker does, that this is a problem requiring unusual erudition and expertise
is disingenuous. It belongs in chapter One of all the textbooks." It
also raises the question as to why Top Dog Dr Williams delegated to Deputy
Dog Professor Secker the task of replying to Catt's letter. Was Professor
Secker Emeritus Professor of the London School of Ducking and Weaving, not of
Electromagnetism? Had Top Dog from the start seen the Catt Anomaly as a
political, not a technical, problem, to be handled by his most senior
political, rather than technical, Deputy Dog? Who then was Top Dog's most
senior expert on electromagnetism? We get a clue from Secker writing on
19dec95; "I asked a number of 'experts' familiar with Ivor Catt's views
if they would .... [review his book], but all declined." This leads us
to a statement on 8nov95 by Wilson of the IEE; "The Institution does not
have Technical Committees which address scientific principles." In turn,
we compare this with Secker's original 4sep95 letter, above, which quoted;
"The Institution has a responsibility to 'promote the general
advancement of electrical science and engineering and their applications and
to facilitate the exchange of information and ideas on these
subjects....'", which Catt had copied to Top Dog in his original 18aug95
letter. Also we note Secker 25oct95; "The
reason that the Catt Anomaly has been around so long is that the 'experts'
have not thought it of sufficient standing to take the trouble to demolish
it!" The Test Case The
objective is to get the IEE (London, 130,000 members) and the IEEE (New York,
300,000 members) to comment in a rational way on the Catt Anomaly. The IEE's
expert first commented, then obfuscated, then announced that he was not an
expert. We are going through the same process with the IEEE. Their top
professional has instructed his top expert Mink to comment on the Catt
Anomaly, and Mink has initially produced a lot of waffle. The scientific
prediction is that after further obfuscation, within nine months, Mink will
announce that he is not an expert. Unfortunately,
other learned bodies, in Germany and France and elsewhere, have very low
membership, perhaps 6,000, and so are relatively insignificant. So the New York experiment has to be conducted very carefully
as a comparative study with London. The
"experts" are terrified, desperate to evade the matter. The
technique for getting the "experts" to communicate includes the
following; Catt himself will never communicate. Catt's agents will each limit to one
letter, with only one question. Only sometimes is a single question answered,
usually after repeated letters. If a letter contains more than one question,
none of the questions are ever answered. When ignored, the letter with its
one question is repeated every six weeks for ever. The
test case of the Catt Anomaly, and the techniques developed to force the
Establishment to communicate, will then be used to open up our other frozen
institutions. Scientific method. A
scientist will refuse to use scientific method when studying the subject of
suppression in science. You can test this. Ask a scientist friend to address
the question of whether new information is suppressed, and he will refuse to
be drawn, hiding behind discussion of Catt's egocentricity or paranoia, which
are not scientific matters. Also, he will refuse to put anything in writing. Howie
and Pepper, refusing to comment on the Catt Anomaly, are front line troops.
They are bitter because they will not be defended by the Establishment. Their
careers are over because I approached them and forced them to comment on
aspects of this body of knowledge. This is the second weakness of the
entrenched Establishment, that its front line troops
will not be defended. I can knock out any individual within the
Establishment, and the rest of the Establishment will withdraw from him. His
duty is to not notice that I exist. Once he admits that I exist, let alone my
question, he is finished. Absolute truth. There
are four people; Luca Turin, Biophysics lecturer in London University; Theocharis and Psimopoulis, and
myself, who all agree that the pivotal question this century is whether
absolute facts exist. Lacking the discipline of objective fact, we fall into
the hands of the salaried Establishment, whatever its technical ignorance and
nonsensical excesses. Consider
the statement, "It is absolutely true that there are no absolute
truths." However, this is probably cheating, although worth pondering.
More generally, the position that there are no absolute truths triggers all
sorts of major difficulties. However, it is non-PC to analyse current PC
dogma. Theocharis (who published on this issue in Nature, 15oct87, Theocharis, 200a Merton Rd., London SW18. tel 081 870 6191) challenges the "opinion" that
if Smith jumped off a high place, he would die. He challenges Smith to
accompany him to the high place, and jump off, in order to test the relative
strengths of Smith's imperfect view and T's certainty, that Smith will die. For my
part, I assert that the concept "Energy" was propounded. This is
absolutely true, and has nothing to do with my point of view. It is an
objective fact, not subjective. It is also absolutely true that no other
person slept in my bed last night, apart from me. This is not a subjective
view; it is objective fact. It is absolutely true that at this moment I am
typing into a computer. We are immersed in a sea of objective facts. (We have
direct access to them, not needing the mediation of paid knowledge brokers.)
Anyone who denies the existence of these facts must deny the purpose of any
communication whatsoever, and so should shut up. Communication is a
superstructure based on an array of agreed absolute facts. Denial of the
existence of any facts necessarily implies denial of the possibility of communication.
We are left merely with mutually supportive noises of uncertain import. In a
lecture, the test of absolute truth is to ask a dissident in the audience
whether it is absolutely true that he is attempting to listen to a lecture.
If he demurs, he has to be ejected from the lecture hall because he is an
intellectual terrorist. He denies the possibility of developing and extending
a body of knowledge. The fact that he is merely going along with the vandals
who have captured learning throughout most of the twentieth century does not
excuse his nihilism. For my
part, I say that I hereby intend to write a sentence which starts and ends
with the word "For". I have also probably succeeded, but this next
step is unnecessary in order to establish an absolute truth, about my
intention. Even more succinct, I intended to start and end a sentence with
the same word. Absolutely true. Anyone who disputes this is disputing the
possibility of any meaningful communication whatsoever, and so should not be
talking, since they believe they are wasting their and our time. Disputing
the validity of this exercise, the disputant is asked to communicate
something (anything) within their nihilistic universe of discourse (and such
activity serves a purpose). They will fail. Thus, I believe the assertion
"There are no absolute truths" becomes the assertion "No
inter-communication is possible". Thus, we are left only with
"views", or states of mind, and all we can do is commune together.
See today's Quaker. He is well on his nihilistic way. Conclusion The
blocking of new information by
all our institutions means the end of civilization. It is of the utmost
importance that the facts of the situation be established soon, and if the
crisis is as severe as I believe, that remedial action be taken. All that is
required is that, should a knowledge broker be proved to have blocked new knowledge, he be held accountable,
something which does not occur today. This accountability will be through his
pocket by way of dismissal. 27apr96 File
no. w4rlectu.doc, [now updated at www.ivorcatt.com/3600.htm
] Ivor
Catt, 121 Westfields, St. Albans AL3 4JR., Herts, England |
|
x |