Dear Mahta Moghaddam,

“But on a separate topic, did you want us to just grab the corrections from the web link or were you going to send me another word file? Either one is fine” –Mahta.

Please “grab the corrections from the web link”.

However, I think the following would be much preferable, and would reduce the damage to the Italians, to the IEEE and to me. It would be more interesting for your readers, who are your primary consideration.

More or less forget about the original article “Catt’s Anomaly”, forget “Conflation” and the P&S reply. Publish as their replacement “The TEM Step”, below. The readers of your journal are not interested in criticism of the article “Catt’s Anomaly” but would be much more interested in what lies behind it. This could be written by me quite briefly. I will try to write it right now, and do a better job when I am back next Tuesday. I think what I write will be a landmark article, and worth missing the deadline for the February issue for.

Here is my attempt this evening.

The TEM Step.

In our digital age, an essential feature of electromagnetic theory is a digital step travelling down a USB cable from computer to printer. The animation is at http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/ieee.htm . We see that more and more negative electric charge appears on the bottom conductor as the TEM step advances.

Everyone agrees that it does not come from the north or the east. The general view, for instance of Nobel Prize Winner Professor Brian Josephson, was that it came from the west, until Sir Michael Pepper FRS, Faraday Medal, knighted for services to physics, Fellow of the Royal Society wrote to me, and later Professor Frederic R. Morgenthaler FIEEE wrote in his Wiley/IEEE text book that this was not possible, because the charge from the west would have to travel at the speed of light. Since they knew very well that classical electromagnetism had not been challenged for a century, the charge had to come from the south. However, Professors Pieraccini and Selleri, publishing in this journal, also knew that classical theory, which demanded charge to appear along the bottom conductor, was indubitably correct. They also knew that charge coming from the south defied Gauss’s Law. So the charge must come from the west, and did not have to travel at the speed of light. In both cases, they kept classical theory, and using classical theory ruled out one source for the charge, western or southern, concluding that the other source, southern or western, was the correct one.

Not doubting classical theory, this was a reasonable attitude. The trouble is, they contradicted each other as to what was the classical theory, westerner or southerner. In our digital age, we need to know how signals travel down our computer cables.

Ivor Catt 4 December 2016