Dear All,

We are going to have a unique opportunity to learn about an ***unconventional theory*** of electromagnetism from invited lectures of two experts in this field, with 50 years of professional experience. 

They are Ivor Catt and David Walton.

Ivor Catt is an electronic engineer with an incredible intuition, deep theoretical knowledge and imagination, and a wealth of engineering solutions and inventions, one of which was his pioneering work of the so called "glitch phenomenon", leading to metastability and synchronization failures in digital systems. He is also known for his patents in wafer scale integration and understanding of crosstalk in digital communications.

David Walton is a physicist (whose first and doctoral degrees were from Newcastle!) with ample knowledge of electromagnetic theories, but also with an impressive electronic engineering and IT experience, in particular providing some remarkable solutions to problems of signal transmission in high speed digital systems. David also has experience of setting up electronic companies. 

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These lectures will be the focus of our Seminar on Electromagnetism, which will be on 9th October 2013 (Wednesday), in the CPD (M413) room, in two periods: 10:00-12:00 (Ivor Catt) and 14:00-16:00 (David Walton).
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Further details about this event are in the attached advert.

As I have more details I'll forward them to you. But, meanwhile, mark the whole day in your diaries and be prepared to listen to interesting and thought-provoking talks, perhaps puzzling and even controversial, and be also prepared to ask many questions. This is why I wanted to invite Ivor and David here for, because otherwise you could just read a lot of material on Ivor Catt's websites (just google "Ivor Catt"), but putting everything in logical order may not be easy (at least for me!).

With this seminar I am also going to launch a MicroSystems Journal Club, a PhD forum of our uSystems research group, whose main aim is to encourage PhD students to talk about their research to their peers in an informal way, thereby reporting on their progress, practicing their presentation skills and simply discussing their research problems at all stages of their development, from the stage of problem discovery, to its proper formulation, analysis of models, methods, CAD tools, and finally to the presentation of results and drawing conclusions. 

Cheers
Alex

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re The Wakefield Experiment

From: Professor Alex Yakovlev

Sent: Thursday, October 24, 2013 8:54 AM

To: Ivor Catt ; Anthony Wakefield

Subject: RE: Wakefield

 

Dear Ivor

 

Our "people in the coffee room" look at the experiment and see what I have already written to you. The scope shows what is described perfectly well in the books about transmission lines and coax, like the one I quoted by Sol Rosenstark

 

This book clearly shows that in a predominantly capacitive coax the propagation of the change voltage (as a result of the effect of the switch being connected) is with the speed of light. The fact that this happens with the speed of light is explained by the known (to people) facts that the changes in the EM (or even gravitational field) propagate with the speed of light.  Why should they deduce anything what happened before this change?

In your coloured picture, the steps labelled with negative time -20, -10 are your imagination, because we cannot see that in the experiment.

 

The fact that the change propagates in both direction is also known by people writing about transmission lines. They show these behaviours in lattice diagrams. 

 

When "people in the coffee room" use these arguments, they don't mention the idea of a stationary field, and presumably they don't need to do it because it is not helpful in explaining the transmission line behaviour.

 

Once again, I am not confident that we have strong facts to put a dent into the existing methods for transmission line analysis that engineers happily use. And they see the Wakefield experiments as the confirmation of these methods, nothing more. What you see there is purely a scientific hypothesis, but engineers don't want to buy it. They don't want to 'imagine', as this is what they think physicists should do. Catch 22 ?!

 

Alex