“My point here is that the courses I took were absolutely useless in providing any clear understanding of radio and antennas. In particular I took one class in antenna theory that had absolutely nothing to do with how antennas worked, it was all about calculating the fields produced by currents in an antenna based upon assumptions.

Basically, I learned that the mathematics of Maxwell's equations said nothing about how antennas worked. That was a major problem for me in my professional work as a radio engineer. To make a long story short, I could never make sense of the textbook theory until I read your articles in Wireless World.” – Harry Ricker.

Harry

Dear Harry,

It’s all coming together.

Right now, 24.2.2021, I shall give the outline, without citing chapter and verse to substantiate the various assertions, or allegations. Those criticised are promised that their criticisms will be added to this text here; …. ….

Aged 85, I am in a hurry, and the matter is urgent. A “conspiracy” http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x56k.htm has gradually evolved, mainly since 1965, to block any further scientific advance. The movement began a very long time ago, with Maxwell’s bizarre equations http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x892max.pdf , but the shock of the rapid transition in electronics in 1965 from sine wave analogue (radio etc.) to digital turned the evolving conspiracy into a tsunami. It buried all those researching high speed digital electronics without trace, except for two articles, http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x84gglitch.pdf , http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x147.pdf , which were published by mistake, somehow evading the protective tsunami.

The Covid fiasco conveniently allied with the evolution of youtube shows the problem up in technicolour. We already had copy admitting that an accredited “expert” must not be seen to have read or even heard “heresy”; http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x6611.htm . Today, someone retired like me, able to do it full time, can rapidly become more expert than the “experts”, in the complex ramifications of covid, which is such a multidimensional issue.

However, let us first go back to a serious problem which has never been pointed out. I first pointed it out in around 1980, and then forgot, that “education” resembles parrot training. The student is taught, or trained, in a narrow range of knowledge which the teacher/lecturer knows. The examiner then examines him to see whether he has “grasped” what the teacher knows, but not what the teacher does not know. In the particular case of Higher National, I was both lecturer and examiner for the same pupils, although usually they are not the same person, and there is some distance between lecturer and examiner. However, they both come from the same stable.

In due course the student gains qualifications, prizes, and even lectureship or professorship by parroting a narrow band of knowledge. No parties know that the real knowledge is much broader, so the student or professor is thought to be master of material, most of which he has never had any contact with. Sir Michael Pepper, “knighted for services to physics”, has no idea how your computer instructs your printer to print. He writes about “plasmon frequency”. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/2812.htm ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmon ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0l1diFGxIg .

A grotesque example was the transmission line between your computer and your printer. The instruction to print is sent down a USB cable by switching a wire from 0v to perhaps 3v. Professor Archie Howie, since he was head of the Cavendish, thinks he has a grasp of this. After all, he was one author of “The Yellow Bible”, http://www.emag-iop.org/speakers , and a CBE. However, his emails to me prove that he has no grasp of how your computer tells your printer to print. Recently, when exposed, he tried to cover his tracks by quoting Jackson.

http://www.fulviofrisone.com/attachments/article/475/Jackson%20J%20D%20Classical%20Electrodynamics%20(Wiley,%201962)(T)(656S).pdf . He does not know that, in his turn, Jackson has no clue about the signal, calling it “a degenerate form”. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x33r.htm . Jackson 1962 is the bible of American university courses in electromagnetism, and predates the digital computer. In education, the only signal allowed down a cable is the sine wave. Howie and Jackson are closely linked, both being part members of my college, Trinity College, Cambridge.

Turning to Josephson, winner of the Nobel Prize for the Josephson Junction. Josephson thinks that the signal down a coaxial cable can have more modes than the sole TEM wave mode. He confuses the coaxial cable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coaxial_cable with the waveguide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waveguide .

When it comes to “The Catt Question”, http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/cattq.htm , about this same signal, both are arrogant and insulting, claiming that others (including me) do not understand the subject. On this subject they both contradict Sir Michael Pepper, http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/2812.htm , also of my college, “knighted for services to physics”. They refuse to clear up this contradiction, or do anything to warn their students that the fundamentals of the electromagnetic theory they are being “taught” and examined on are in dispute.

Palmer https://users.physics.ox.ac.uk/~palmerc/index.htm has said that the idea that energy is continually reciprocating in a charged capacitor, previously thought to have a stationary electric field, is merely “another description”. This is not the remark of a scientist, so Palmer cannot be a scientist. If he is a scientist, he has to pursue the matter. Of course, he has said he will re-perform the Wakefield 1 experiment, http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x343.pdf , and then, like Spargo, has not done so. However, that is not the key point, which is that when presented with the only extant explanation of the Wakefield 1 results, a true scientist would be interested, which he does not appear to be. A scientist would appreciate the massive implication of the Wakefield result. It questions one of the fundamental building blocks of classical electromagnetism; the electric field.

What we see is a posse of careerists who have captured all the commanding heights of “science”, who live within what Kuhn calls the ruling paradigm. They give students and each other A levels, degrees, PhDs, professorships and medals for keeping within that paradigm. Pepper can write nonsense on Cattq and then go silent for thirty years, meanwhile garnering a knighthood “for services to physics” and loads of “research” money.