"Electronics World", May 2009, p16

	Wave-Particle duality and The Catt Question Lord Martin Rees, Professor Martin Rees, Sir Michael Pepper FRS, Brian Josephson , Professor Howie FRS, Dr Neil McEwan, May Chiao
18 July 2009 Comment on my letter, published in "Electronics World", May 2009. This is one paragraph from that letter; "There is a general idea, stated to me by Professor Howie, then Head of the Cavendish, that "Physical reality is composed of sine waves." The entrenched idea that classical electromagnetic theory refers only to sine waves is very important, since it submerges "The Catt Question" in complexity and confusion. The truth is that "The Catt Question" exposes a fundamental problem for classical electromagnetism which has been hidden by the general commitment to sine waves. It is very simple, and discusses a single voltage step travelling at the speed of light guided by two conductors. Unfortunately, experts in electromagnetic theory cannot "see" a single step, but in their brains they convert it into an array of sine waves. This makes it too difficult for them to grasp the fundamental, simple problem, "The Catt Question"." Since May, it has occurred to me that there is another factor which is deeply debilitating when a luminary - academic or text book writer - tries to grasp "The Catt Anomaly". This is "wave-particle duality". In order to grasp "The Catt Question", it is important for ones mind to not be cluttered by the notion of particles. This is easy for me, because decades ago I excluded the particle from my world-view. I am not alone. "We all of us have some idea of what the basic axioms in physics will turn out to be. The quantum or particle will surely not be amongst them; the field, in Faraday's and Maxwell's sense, could possibly be, but it is not certain." - Einstein in "The Born-Einstain Letters" by Max Born, pub. Macmillan 1971. p164. Here, Einstein showed prescience. Whereas he had the electric field and the magnetic field, under my aegis they morphed into a single permissible field, the ExH electromagnetic field, or TEM Wave. When considering "The Catt Question", if photons and suchlike are cluttering a luminary's brain, he must find the very simple case, of a TEM Step, extremely difficult to grasp. In my article "The Heaviside Signal" , I quote Einstein promoting "The Rolling Wave", where E causes H causes E. That also hopelessly confuses "The Catt Question". The simple, clear representation that makes "The Catt Question" easy to comprehend is what I have called "The Heaviside Signal", where E and H coexist, and do not cause each other. With this view, the TEM Wace is monolithic, what Heaviside called "a slab of energy current", and moves forward unchanged at the speed of light. The problem that no one noticed for a century was that this meant electric charge had to move at the speed of light - the fatal flaw posed by "The Catt Question". [Added on 12 June 2013.] P241 “Schrödinger gave his inaugural professorial lecture .... on 13 April 1956. The theme was his familiar message about the nature of reality and the superiority of the wave model to the wave-particle duality of the Copenhagen Interpretation .... “ - Gribbin P254 “’With a very few exceptions (such as Einstein and Laue) all the rest of theoretical physicists were unadulterated asses and I was the only sane person left.’ He complained that his efforts to get people to take the puzzle of wave-particle duality seriously had fallen on stony ground .... ‘ .... they say, I insist upon the view that “all is waves” .... ‘. “ – from John Gribbin, “Erwin Schrödinger and the Quantum Revolution”, pub. Bantam 2012 Compare with Einstein; "We all of us have some idea of what the basic axioms in physics will turn out to be. The quantum or particle will surely not be amongst them; the field, in Faraday's and Maxwell's sense, could possibly be, but it is not certain." - Einstein in "The Born-Einstain Letters" by Max Born, pub. Macmillan 1971. p164. Compare with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave%E2%80%93particle_duality ; “Wave–particle duality is deeply embedded into the foundations of quantum mechanics, so well that modern practitioners rarely discuss it as such. In the formalism of the theory, all the information about a particle is encoded in its wave function, a complex-valued function roughly analogous to the amplitude of a wave at each point in space. This function evolves according to a differential equation (generically called the Schrödinger equation), and this equation has solutions that follow the form of the wave equation. Propagation of such waves leads to wave-like phenomena such as interference and diffraction.
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