The Instrumentalist’s Manifesto; http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x8cktony.htm

Davies

Five years later.

I feel sure that analysis of Tony Davies's behaviour will help us to understand why science is dead. He and his ilk control all the relevant institutions, including all means of communication. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x162.pdf . Do they only look backwards in time? https://ethw.org/Histelcon

Since I was "disappeared", I have only gained access to a university once. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x5cz2.htm

Tony Davies, whom I had never met, interrupted a discussion between me and John Dore FIEE in the IEE/IET HQ in London. Dore then said; "May I introduce you to the great Ivor Catt." Davies replied that he knew all about Ivor Catt, and recounted some of it. [Jump to “Histelcon”, below.]

I secured his card. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/ieeetonycard.pdf , ex member of the Board of Directors of the IEEE.

I had been silenced by the IEEE since they published my major 20pp article in 1967, half a century before. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x147.pdf

That evening, I emailed Tony, inviting him and his wife to dinner at a restaurant of his choosing at my expense. He accepted, but said he would pay half the cost.

During the next decades, he sent me 20,000 words in emails, of which his first attachment (reproduced here, below) is an example.

Meanwhile, my objective was to get his help to publish 50 words in an IEEE journal. He did not lift a finger to help, or say that he was unable to help. Later, when his IEEE published peer reviewed defamatory comment about me, also misrepresenting my work, he made no comment. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x311a.htm

He is not alone. Such parasites control all our relevant institutions, and all education at the school and university levels.

The only suggested theory is that if such a parasite shows signs of getting involved in heresy, he is excluded from "the club". Major scientific advance is heresy, destructive of entrenched reputations, lecture notes and text books. It has to be blocked. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x162.pdf

A member of “the club” must not comment on experimental results (like Wakefield) which undermine Establishment dogma, or he is ousted. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/tong21.htm

Ivor Catt 13.3.2022

Tony’s comments on the above will be added here; …….

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“Not even trying”; http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x8ahcharlton.html

“I don’t care where the charge comes from.” John Dore FIEE re cattq, on the phone to Catt on 13.3.2022 . Any Dore comment will be added here ….

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Comments for Ivor Catt [by Tony Davies from five years ago]:

Filters

I will start by responding to your saying that you did not know what a passive filter was. For sure

terminology can often be a problem and sources of deep misunderstandings. More of that later. I give a

long answer, because much of my life has been in the Circuit Theory field, which has been a ‘foundation’

for my attitudes to other topics.

Historically I believe that Campbell was one of the first to develop the concept of what was then called a

‘wave filter’ – according to A.T. Starr (Electric Circuits and Wave Filters, Pitman, 1938), Campbell said: A

wave filter is a device for separating waves characterised by a difference in frequency.

Of course, all that they were thinking of was ‘steady state’ analogue telecommunications, no pulses or digital

technology.

It started with Heaviside’s circuit model (a cascade of Series L,R and parallel C, G elements) for a finite

length of uniform transmission, with increased accuracy as the circuit components becomes greater in

number and at the same time smaller in value – so that the real line was the limit of an infinite number of

infinitesimally small L,R,C,G components. From this model all the conventional ideas of characteristic

impedance, propagation constant, etc. and formulae for input impedance of terminated lines and so on all

follow.

The wave filter idea arose from noticing that with a finite number of LC elements in the model, the actual

behaviour is a low-pass filter, and the theory of image-parameter filters can be developed and extended to

make high pass, band-pass and band-stop filters. With skill and clever tricks, one can implement high-

performance frequency-selective filters for many applications.

I certainly knew about filters in a simple way while I was a teenager, then in the army I learned all the

traditional transmission-line theory and simple filter design – and then had to teach this stuff to others by

which I came to understand it much better. That was a good foundation for then becoming an electrical

engineering undergraduate at Southampton.

In those days filters used in the communications fields were made of L, C components and were designed

using the image-parameter method (based on transmission line theory, computationally fairly simple, but

with inherent approximations which led to discrepancies between design and practice) or by the “exact” or

insertion loss method developed by Cauer in Germany and Darlington in USA (which was superior but at

that time required very lengthy and tedious numerical calculations). Since all of these filters were made of

L,C components they had no valves (tubes) nor, later, transistors, hence no LT or HT power supplies were

needed and they were called ‘passive’.

Passive circuit theory’ mainly developed with the restrictions that the building blocks were Linear, Lumped,

Time invariant, and also Finite in number and the structures necessarily reciprocal, e.g. the building blocks

were R, L, C, M (and perhaps also ideal transformers). Later Tellegen invented the Gyrator, so that non-

reciprocal passive circuits arose. The finite number was important in order to get unique solutions (even

with networks of linear resistors, if there are an infinite number of them, various unreal paradoxical

solutions can arise using only Kirchhoff’s Laws).

A nice feature was that the input impedance of any such circuit is a positive-real rational function and also

given any positive-real rational function, an R, L, C circuit with this as its input impedance could be

obtained by a step-by-step procedure with a finite number of steps – what would now be regarded as an

iterative algorithm guaranteed to terminate with a successful result. This subject of ‘passive network

synthesis’ was a core subject for electrical engineering undergraduates in many places.

It was within this context that the idea of ‘Active filters’ arose – by adding some active element (ideal

amplifier, negative impedance convertors and so on), methods of designing wave filters were being

proposed, but they had no realistic applications in telecommunications at the time (e.g. late 1950s onwards

to early 1970s). At the GEC in Coventry, few people took the idea of active filters seriously; all

experienced engineers regarded them as silly notions from the academic world which would never be used

in real systems. When I joined the academic world in the mid 1960s, my ‘target interest’ was to achieve

something in the field of active filters, with which I did have some success. But it was the integrated circuit

OpAmp (particularly the 741) which became the initial building block suitable to make practically useful

active filters, which by now are of course routinely used.

Narrow band filter looking for 2kHz:

About your story of a very narrow band filter with a centre frequency of 2kHz, I believe anyone with any

experience and competence in classical filter design, old fashioned circuit theory etc, would know very well

that whatever the input signal to such a filter was, all that could come out in steady state conditions would be

a 2kHz sine wave. That would be true even if the input signal were white Gaussian noise.

If the engineers at GEC Portsmouth did not know that, I see that as a problem with their education rather

than a problem in circuit theory and filter design.

I can say that I encountered similar failings among GEC engineers when I worked at Coventry and much

later, similar issues at British Aerospace in Stevenage. I am not saying that to suggest I was 'better than

they were' - but they and I had different experiences, a different education and different skills.

The BAe engineers were good at designing complicated missiles which were good at hitting their targets,

but were uncertain about the spectrum of a burst of sine-wave which was switched on, and after a short

while switched off, and I was asked about that. They were particularly puzzled by what the answer would be

if the sine wave was switched on only for a very short time, much less than one period. I found that to be a

rather easy problem.

In the time domain it is a multiplication of a continuous sine wave by a square pulse, and they did not know

that multiplication in the time domain is convolution in the frequency domain – something which I expected

the ‘better’ electrical engineering undergraduates to understand! Maybe not nowadays since much of the

engineering education has been downgraded in many universities.

Reputations

Successful senior academics are typically cautious and avoid saying anything which might indicate that they

do not understand everything of importance, and along with that some unfortunately become arrogant, and

start by assuming that anyone with a different idea (especially someone who is younger or less well known)

must be wrong.

Regarding reputations, there is the well known case of Prof Eric Laithwaite, He was a very forceful

character, and when I first saw him, felt that he was just the kind of person to encourage school leavers to

take up an engineering career. However, I later became disillusioned with him noticing some things which

he claimed to be true which I knew he knew were false. Then in his late career he made claims about

gyroscope behaviour, all generally agreed to be 'rubbish' and and which effectively destroyed his previous

good reputation.

Peer-Review and the blocking of new concepts

There is no doubt that the peer review process (and the behaviour of some journal editors) makes it very

difficult to get publications on novel topics which ‘disagree with’ or undermine the theory and practice in

fields in which the ‘experts’ have built their reputations. I have talked about this with several people

recently and there is agreement that this is true and is a problem.

It is easy to explain, of course. For an early career person to make mistakes is generally acceptable. In fact

some say that if you make no mistakes you will never learn anything new. So an early career researcher can

get away with publishing something with flaws in it, which need not damage his career. For an ‘expert’ who

has reached the stage of being an authority on some topic to be found to have made errors over some

fundamental aspect is an ‘unwelcome’ situation and the expert is naturally liable to try to suppress

awareness and publication of anything which hints that his expertise is deficient.

Additionally, there are those who might hope to ‘steal’ the new idea and claim it for themselves, and use the

suppression of the publications of the real discoverer as a dishonest means to this end. I am sure that there

are intermediate cases quite often where tricks are used to delay a publication while reviewers make some

similar advances themselves to catch up and gain credit.

Set against this is the need to prevent the publication of fraudulent of faulty material, for which I think it can

be claimed that the peer-review process does provide a mechanism that has been demonstrated to often

work.

I had an e-mail message a few days ago from a colleague I worked with at British Aerospace in ~1988. He

is now retired, but mentioned his experience with sending a paper to an IEEE journal about asynchronous

communications mechanisms: After an initial review which encouraged some changes and a resubmission,

there were three reviewers, one was enthusiastic, one said it was interesting work and should be published,

and the third implied that it was of no particular value so not deserving of publication. The editor sought an

opinion from some other unnamed IEEE member who said that ‘the work might be wrong’ (with no further

remarks) – and on this basis the editor simply refused to accept the paper. This was all a long time ago.

The subject matter was later the basis of research at Newcastle University and several successful EPSRC

grants!

So this is a good example of the peer-review process being bad, but a question is, what could it be replaced

by that would be better?

There is the example of the ‘cold fusion’ fiasco, where Fleishman and Pons believed that they had

discovered a way to achieve fusion of deuterium atoms at room temperature, and they had started to prepare

a publication to go in Nature. If that had happened the peer review process could have raised questions

about the details, and this could have prevented the fiasco by encouraging a better investigation into what

had really been discovered. However, what happened instead was that a ‘press release’ was produced

hinting at what had been apparently discovered and the University of Utah administrators got the idea that

this discovery would bring wealth and fame to the university, then lawyers were brought in who did not

understand the distinction between power and energy, etc. and they forbade the publication of key details.

Cold fusion had the potential, if true, to provide unlimited low cost energy for the human race, but also

required that many of the fundamentals of nuclear physics were completely wrong. So, after a few years

the investigations showed that Fleischmann and Pons had made mistakes as a result of not understanding

and not calibrating the calorimeters which they were using. They were not crooks, just insufficiently careful

in their experiments and failed to get expert advice when needed.

Editors in IEE (IET) versus Editors in IEEE

I am not very familiar with the publication processes in IET as it is now, but in the ‘old days’ of IEE, the

editing process was very centralised (at Stevenage) and I can therefore believe that if a senior editor (staff or

member) formed a bad opinion about a particular author or technical development, that could be ‘blocked’

in an unjustifiable and improper way. There was certainly some ‘bad practice’ of which I was aware of.

However, IEEE is such a distributed organisation that I find it hard to believe that there could be any

‘conspiracy’ to block a particular author or particular subject-development. Within one IEEE Society it is

not impossible, but the IEEE Societies are very independent of one another, and so I do not see how this

practice could cross Society boundaries (at least unless there was a serious ethics violation which made its

way up through the Member Conduct and Ethics procedures).

One of the troublesome issues which does cause much widespread concern at the present in IEEE is

deliberate plagiarism, it is a problem both for journal publications and for conferences.

Transients on Transmission Lines.

My understanding of and teaching about transmission lines was for a long time based only on steady state

sinusoidal excitation, and although this covered reflections, that was just in the context of standing waves,

nodes and antinodes, etc. However around 1975 I was asked to teach an undergraduate course module

which included ‘Transients on Transmission Lines’ as a significant part. The previous teacher for this had

concentrated entirely on the application to high-voltage d.c. lines and switchgear. Not being much

interested in that, and knowing that most of the students were aiming for electronics-related careers, I

decided after some investigation to base what I taught on digital systems which sent 5V pulses from gate

outputs along printed circuit strip-lines, etc. Solving such problems and using the Bewley Lattice method

became the basis of the course which I taught – but I kept mainly in the framework of lossless uniform lines.

I avoided the need for field theory, Maxwell’s equations and so on, because I was using a circuit theory

viewpoint. Text books on transmission lines usually said nothing at all about transients, I used an

application report of Motorola on their ECL circuits to get some information. So, although it is somewhat

‘rusty’ now, I think I may know more about transients in digital circuits than many digital systems designers

knew in the 1970s and 1980s.

(also attached is a scan of a handout which I used to give to all my students on the course module – page 1

mislaid, I may find it)

Capacitors and open-circuit Transmission Lines

Because of the experience of teaching transmission line transients in digital circuits, I do not see any

problem in regarding a traditional cylindrical capacitor as a rolled up open-circuit-terminated transmission

line. Applying a unit step via a resistor R results in reflections going to and fro until the capacitor C is

charged, and this is a stepped approximation to the ‘text-book’ theory of an exponential rise with RC time

constant.

Field theory

I learned enough field theory to pass the examinations required, but never felt as comfortable with my

understanding of it as I did with circuit theory, where I was confident enough to consider I knew some

things about it which the writers of the textbooks off the time did not understand (some of the recommended

texts for electrical engineering courses in UK were very bad in the 1950s and 1960s – the much better books

which arose from Ernst Guillemin and his students from MIT were only beginning to reach UK teaching

practice).

My ‘practical’ experience of electronics mostly avoided microwaves and waveguides, I stayed below about

200MHz, and generally felt that the Poynting vector idea and the Lorenz equation was usually enough from

field theory for me to survive. So to feel that I really have a good enough understanding to evaluate your

descriptions and animations of steps travelling along conductors and deciding what the electrons really do,

and why, I would need to do some study and revision which for the time being I do not feel I have the time

for!

I do have some hints and suggestions coming from some academic researchers that the foundations of

quantum theory – especially the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle – may be only ‘approximations’ to a

reality which is beginning to be uncovered now that methods are being developed to ‘see’ details of the

structure of not only molecules but also individual atoms. It might be more deterministic than quantum

theory proposes. So perhaps a new ‘paradigm’ is going to arise in the coming years.

Readers and Writers and Computers

When I first sent things which I had written for publication, there were few writers and many readers (and I

also had the idea that one should submit a paper only if one had something of value or novelty which would

be useful and people would want to read). Over the years this has changed – because of the requirements in

the academic world, the number of writers has increased immensely and hardly anyone reads most of the

papers which they write. Many people criticise this state of affairs but academic careers and reputations

increasingly rely on it and the modern processes of evaluating university departments every few years with

‘research assessment exercises’ and the like has made the situation far worse: any good professor is

expected to publish several breakthrough papers every year. Since there are so many papers published

which few people have the time or inclination to read, evaluation criteria such as ‘impact factors’ and

‘citations’ are used as indicators of quality, and these can be and are automated, so that human readers

become unnecessary. We are now at the stage where human writers will also soon be unnecessary, the

papers themselves will be produced by computers. That is already beginning to happen, ‘artificial

intelligence’ programmes can be supplied with a title and an outline synopsis, and will do an automatic trawl

through the internet (using Wikipedia and much more besides) to find information and create a paper which

has the title and synopsis requested. There are now even ‘authors’ who are not real, from whom one can

order a review/tutorial book on any desired scientific subject, and the book will be created for the particular

customer requesting it. This is a kind of ‘scam’ but apparently some libraries are being tricked by it and

paying real money.

Catt spiral

I have lost track of Peter Osman: in the mid 1980s when there was a ‘rearrangement’ in London University

and Chelsea College and Queen Elizabeth College were merged with King’s College London to make what

was temporarily called KQC, he was left ‘academically stranded’ – I think he was a Reader somewhere, he

came to City University as a professor into Computer Science. His research topic was some kind of spiral

wafer-scale computer-architecture with communications links between the arms of the spiral. It sounds like

the ‘Catt Spiral’ but I do not remember any more: I hoped at the time that it would lead to collaboration

between Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, but that did not happen, the opportunities for

collaboration mostly led to suspicions and misunderstandings. Later, Computer Science got the title of

Informatics, and Peter Osman became Dean – but soon after that I left to go to King’s College London

(Electronic Engineering) and more or less lost contact with him. Instead I had problems with the Head of

Computer Science at KCL because I was teaching software engineering to electronic engineering students

(on the orders of my HoD) which the Computer Science Head regarded as illegal.

Arnold Lynch

I often travelled between Potters Bar and London on the train with Arnold – for some of the time he was a

visiting academic at City University and went there one or two days per week. We used to walk from Kings

Cross Station to the university, long enough to have many interesting conversations about many subjects.

GEC Microwave research of long ago

Every six weeks or so I have a lunch or dinner meeting with a group of people who are mainly long-retired

microwave engineers who were once at GEC Research Labs at Wembley. Some were clearly very high-

level and clever people, including some good mathematicians. The last dinner we had was on 30 th March,

and as an ‘experiment’, I asked them if they had heard the name of ‘Ivor Catt’. Two indicated that they

remembered the name but could not recall why or where. Another, after a short while, clearly did

remember, and knew something of your questioning of Maxwell’s idea of displacement current – but said

(and I do not recall enough from the past to understand his comments) that the behaviour of electrons and

the transfers of energy in a klystron was a situation where Maxwell’s displacement current ideas are needed

– and alternative concepts for explaining things in transmission lines, etc. cannot be applied.

Another colleague at King’s College London told me that he would not take too seriously anything

published in Wireless World, since anyone with significant fundamental ideas should publish their work in

more ‘serious high-reputation’ journals, where they would be properly evaluated (!!).

Enough for now

I feel sure that in the preceding rambled thoughts, I have written enough, you may say I have written too

much!

Tony Davies

2017 April 4^th

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Histelcon

[From “Five years later”, above.]

https://ethw.org/Histelcon

http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x38q.htm

Yesterday, 15.3.2022, I stumbled on “Histelcon”.

“Tony Davies, whom I had never met, interrupted a discussion between me and John Dore FIEE in the IEE/IET HQ in London.”

John Dore and I were in the middle of a rapprochement. John Dore had brought along an enormous, two yard long logic diagram of the first transistorised computer that we had been involved in designing fifty years later.

Key speakers in Davies’s “HISTELCOM” were Selleri and Pelosi, who rubbished me, misrepresenting my work and defaming me, in peer reviewed articles in Davies’s IEEE, on which he was previously on the IEEE Board of Directors. He has nothing to say about this concidence.

About HISTELCON

…. ….

Thanks to the efforts of Anthony Davies, IEEE Region 8 Past Director and Histelcon 2019 chair, papers from the conference proceedings have been made available through the links below for open-access viewing on IEEE Xplore.

https://www.histelcon2019.org/ See Davies, Selleri, Pelosi

When the Iron Curtain collapsed, Tony Davies earned his spurs by going east and shepherding vast numbers of engineers beyond the Iron Curtain into the Western IEEE. Both Tony’s and John Dore’s orientation is towards the history of computers and the like, not possible advances today. John will always say that today’s, and future, designs will build on successful designs of the past. When we watch John being interviewed by “Demyst”, we see how dangerous his attitude is when it comes to something like “The Glitch”. There he states that “The Glitch” has been proven by past experience to make no threat in the future.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/conhome/9032256/proceeding

The Key role of Giovanni Giorgi in Developing the MKSA System of Units

Fabrizio Frezza;Stefano Maddio;Giuseppe Pelosi;Stefano Selleri

Publication Year: 2019,Page(s):5 - 6

Recent Outcomes of the Investigations on Guglielmo Marconi Supposed Experiments in Switzerland

Giuseppe Pelosi;Stefano Selleri

Publication Year: 2019,Page(s):11 - 13

Cited by: Papers (1)

· Abstract

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