The International Incident.
The
Josephs - Gossick - IEE clash.
by Dr. Arnold Lynch and Ivor Catt. 2feb97. Transcript of interview
tape.
Ivor Catt;
Arnold Lynch came to my house probably
fifteen years ago. I think it was to do with the biography of Heaviside by Searle, but I haven't met him for a long time
now except that he came to the house where I live now in St. Albans a week ago,
and now he's come again, and he agreed to talk about - I've forgotten!
Arnold Lynch;
H. J. Josephs
Ivor Catt;
About Josephs! The reason for this is I have
a lot of material, a lot of information about the international incident which
is late Josephs; that is, times like 1970, 1980, but Arnold Lynch knew Josephs
at Dollis Hill, maybe in the '30s or '40s. So it is very important to get down
from him about early Josephs if the international incident is important,
as I believe. My position is that the international incident involving Gossick, the Burndy Library and
the I.E.E. is significant way beyond electromagnetic theory and beyond those
individuals, and tells us about the politics and the psychology of science. So
today is the second of February in 1997 and here you have Arnold Lynch.
Lynch;
H J Josephs was born in 1900 and he got
caught right at the end of the war in 1918 and was in the forces for about a
year I believe, and was mixed up somehow in the field of telegraphy and with
efforts to tap in on German communications and to know whether the British
communications were being overhear. When I conversations I mean telegraphy. It
was all Morse Code. I think there were complicated
experiments done with wires connected to earth posts at places a few yards
apart detecting earth currents passing between them. There were field
galvanometers. Rather oddly, I have come across one of those galvanometers in
another context, and I can give some more information about that if it is
really needed. But Josephs was demobilised, I suppose, in 1919, and continued
to be interested in this subject, and he spoke to somebody who said; "Oh,
the man who really knows about this is Oliver Heaviside.
You should go and see him. Josephs, according to his own story, went straight
off to Paignton, and went and knocked on the door. He
could hear footsteps in the house, but the door was never opened. He got as
near as that to interviewing Oliver Heaviside when he
was very young. Well, Josephs was employed by the Post Office Engineering
Department as a draughtsman working, I think, in South London. Then a few years
later he was transferred to the research station at Dollis Hill in the days
before it had the permanent building. It was still a few huts. At that stage he
was still a draughtsman, but he showed interest in field telegraphy and the
like. I don't know who it was spotted that he had a genius for mathematics, but
he found himself being used as a mathematical assistant to Dr. Radley, who afterwards became director of the research
station, and then Engineer in Chief, and then the Director General for the
whole Post Office. Radley was probably quite a good
teacher. he was certainly a very effective Director of
the Research Station. Josephs found himself being introduced to what I would
call very difficult mathematics. The legend among the generation was that
Josephs had started by learning about Bessel Functions, and was gradually
working his way backwards until, by the time that we knew him,
he was studying the theory of quadratic equations. [Note added 16.2.99: I now
know more about Joseph's education. He learned electromagnetic theory at
evening classes for City-&-Guilds certificates, up to their highest level,
by which he qualified for I.E.E. membership. His knowledge of statistics,
however, was probably based on unsystematic use of text-books to solve problems
brought to him in his work at Dollis Hill. Education at evening classes was
efficient for examination purposes but was confined to a syllabus. Contrast my
experience as an undergraduate in physics, encouraged to read original papers
and thus becoming familiar with conventions about providing references. I think
this accounts for much of Joe's failure to explain the
sources of his information.] What Josephs certainly did do was to pick up how
to use the Heaviside operational Calculus,
and he tried to get behind that and find out why it worked. he
was genuinely interested. But he was a strange sort of character. He hadn't
gone through the normal channels to get where he'd got, and didn't seem to
understand how they worked. The story what I can entirely believe was that on
one occasion Dr. Radley was having him go into
Central London to meet the Assistant Engineer in Chief of the day to explain
what they were doing about the picking up of dangerous earth currents on long
distance trunk circuits. They were to meet over lunch, and then discuss. But
Josephs didn't want go into lunch at a hotel. He would rather have lunch at
home. So he was to have lunch, and then go down to join them at 2 O'clock.
Well, he went down to the hotel at 2 O'clock, and at ten past two they hadn't
turned up to meet him. So he went out to a cinema for the afternoon. But he
survived all that sort of thing, and he and Radley
did some very good work indeed, which was published with full acknowledgement
to Josephs. Josephs went on doing mathematical work.
Catt;
What year are you talking about now,
published, approximately?
Lynch;
Published? Approximately
1931, 32. He went on with mathematical work for the rest of his official
career. I don't think it involved Heaviside's work
other than the use of the Operational Calculus. But when Josephs reached the
age of sixty, he had the option of being kept on - they were quite prepared to
keep him after the normal retirement age - but what he chose to do was to
retire immediately and [tape count 120] work on the Heaviside
papers - that is - we are talking now of 1960. He retired to work on the papers
that had been left by Heaviside, and then the second
crop of them that had been found under the floorboards of the house that he had
lived in. He retired to Tankerton, outside
Whitstable, and worked on them there. He worked on copies, but he never
produced anything publishable from that. Part of the trouble was that he was a
perfectionist. If he were writing out a manuscript and
made a mistake somewhere half way down the page, he scrapped that page and
began again from the top of the page. It may be that he had drawn conclusions,
and we know that he wrote a number of unpublished papers in the period from 1960
onwards, and he may not have felt that he understood them well enough to let
them go into print. I have actually go tone of these that he wrote in the very
late 1980's. It's beautifully written. It's got very clear claims about Heaviside having anticipated a lot of work usually credited
to other people; Einstein and Godel for example, but
clearly it would never get past referees because he does not explain how he
knows how he knows all these things. It is just his own
say-so. I think that gives a good deal of his career, but I must go back now to
approximately 1950 when the IEE was going to celebrate the Heaviside
centenary. I think this came as a bit of a surprise to some people because not
everybody thought that Heaviside was one of the greets. Though possibly we do believe
that a bit more nowadays. There were several groups of people working
almost independently to prepare papers on Heaviside's
life and his work. Radley and Josephs were
collaborating to provide a sort of appraisement on just how valuable the Heaviside calculus was, and in what circumstances it could
be used. I think the paper that resulted was mainly Joseph's work. Josephs and
his assistant; her name was Beryl Turner, went down to Paignton
and Torquay to meet members of the Heaviside family/.
It's amazing how much they managed to find out about Heaviside
that we don't know from other sources. The found out, for example, about his
education, which was a good deal better than Oliver Heaviside
himself had made it out to be. At quite a late stage, apparently, they
discovered the existence of G. F. C. Searle. I could have told them about
Searle, of only I had known that Josephs was collecting information about Heaviside. But at that stage I didn't know. Josephs went to
visit Searle in Cambridge. I have heard a little about what an odd person
Josephs found Searle to be; an anecdote or two about walking with Searle along
one of the main streets in Cambridge and, seeing a crowd of people gathered
round a bus stop. Searle looking and saying; "That's not the way to wait
for a bus! Form a queue! You; were you here first? You stand there. Now, others
get in line behind."
IC But you were taught by Searle?
AL I was taught by Searle, yes.
IC So you have other sources for Searle's
behaviour.
AL Oh, this doesn't surprise me in the least.
There are plenty of anecdotes about Searle. I have had that. And there was
another one from Josephs; I don't remember exactly, but I know the point was
that they were walking past a house and Searle saw a painter working, painting
one of the windows, and disapproved, and told the painter so. No, I think that
... Is that enough to give the flavour for the sort of chap Josephs was?
IC Well, one thing I would like to
interpolate is, Josephs investigated Heaviside's
operational calculus, and I think I have a little book published by Josephs;
what's called a micrograph.
AL That's right, one of the Methuen
monographs. Yes. I think he wrote that in the early 1930's.
IC Josephs did?
AL Yes. I'm told by mathematicians that the
operational calculus is really obsolete these days. You use Fast Fourier
Transforms instead. I wish I understood either of them. Josephs became
interested in other mathematical subjects, like the theory of statistics. He
came to that quite fresh. I don't know whether he developed anything
brilliantly new, but he was genuinely interested. He wrote papers for internal
circulation at the research station at Dollis Hill.
That was a pause.
AL There were known to be a lot of Heaviside papers in the archives of the I.E.E., and I think
the librarian was a little reluctant top have people examining them, because of
their value.
IC Was that Wright? [Note added 16.2.99:
Probably Wright, I.E.E. librarian 1948-1971 approx. At that time the I.E.E. did
not have a specialist Archivist.]
AL So Josephs decided to write an account of
the information that could be found in them. The result was in fact a biography
of Heaviside, and that biography exists in the I.E.E.
as a typescript. It's all that it ever was. It's never been published. It seems
to be pretty good, but unfortunately it has again the Josephs characteristic of
giving all the information, but not saying where he got it from. So although
it's got up like a smallish book, it is almost devoid of references to his
sources. It does take away a lot of the value. But [for] anybody who wants to
get a view of Heaviside other than that in the
biography that came out about six or seven years ago, that biography, or
introduction to Heaviside's work is pretty good.
IC I believe I have a copy of it.
AL Have you! I mentioned Josephs' assistant
Beryl Turner; still alive. I tried to get in touch with her about four or five
years ago with a view to tape recording what she might remember about the Heaviside enquiries, but at the time she was just widowed,
and very unhappy about meeting anybody associated with Dollis Hill. Her husband
had been a senior man at Dollis Hill. Somehow, she didn't like top be talking
about what she had done in those days. But it's just possible that she'ld be willing to talk now. The embarrassing is that
nobody seems to know what became of the notes that she typed up concerning
those investigations. So...
IC When she and Josephs went down to Torquay
in 1950?
AL Yes. So anybody who did try to interview
her now would have to be very circumspect about what had happened to the notes.
Pause.
AL I try to sum up Josephs in this way. He
was a natural, gifted mathematician, but with some rather odd characteristics
in the way he got on with the rest of the world around him. It's difficult to
account for. I know he was brought up in a pretty rough area in South London,
and all his life, when I knew him, he had a squint, which was due to having
been hit by a half brick thrown at him in the street when he was about
fourteen. So you would think he would know how to get on with other people, and
yet, somehow, he was unusual in his relations to others. He was drawn in on
himself. Though I believe he was brought up in a very normal family; one with
no particular mathematical interests. His son, I think, works for the
Marylebone Cricket Club. Josephs was more or less on my level in the grades in
which we were employed, although he was fourteen years older than I am. We move
up side by side, and from about 1939 onwards, if I ran into mathematical
problems, I could, quite officially, go to Josephs to get help with them.
Though it was notorious that if you did go to him, if your interest happened to
chime with his current interest, that was fine. But if
not, you would come back with something quite irrelevant. I remember going to
him with some other problem altogether, and coming back with a copy of
somebody's patent on negative feedback. That was quite typical. But he was a
good mathematician. He was helpful to other people if they came along with a
problem that he liked the look of. But from about 1947 or 48 onwards he began
to have assistants who were much more helpful to other people. We usually went
to the assistants rather than to Josephs from then onwards.
IC But that was
psychological, not competence?
AL Oh, indeed, it was much more a question of
his being primarily interested in one thing at a time, and regarding it as a
bit of a waste of time to talk about some that he had disposed of years before,
and he thought you would be able to find his account of it somewhere. Well,
very often you couldn't.
IC Now, the period of years where you
overlapped him in Dollis Hill is about how many?
AL 1936 to 1960.
IC You would say that during that period you
actually talked with him for roughly how many hours altogether, would you say?
AL Oh, hours
altogether; only two or three. But we were a crowd who talked a lot between
ourselves at Dollis Hill; in those days, particularly.
IC How often were you in a group where he was
speaking?
AL I don't remember being in larger groups
where he was speaking, but he did occasionally give technical lectures. There
were two or three of them.
IC And you went to them.
AL Oh, yes.
IC And were they all on maths?
AL Oh, yes.
IC How can we diversify across to deciding
about his competence in electromagnetism?
AL Well, partly from what he published.
You've got to be competent in electromagnetism to write as he did about Heaviside's calculus. But I also know that he came under a
new boss in about 1951 or 2;
R. F. J. Jarvis. The name is probably not well known, but it was he who
developed a theory of coaxial cables in the mid-1930's, and was responsible for
all the theoretical work which led to the laying of the first British cable
between London and Birmingham in 1938. This was one that was capable of
carrying television signals; the first of its kind. Josephs worked very happily
under Jarvis. [Note added 16.2.99: Jarvis published his work in P.O.E.E.J. I
will check whether Joe was a joint author.] [tape 300]
They did a number of things together., including an
attempt to predict what was going to happen if the United States people let off
a nuclear bomb in the upper atmosphere, as I believe they did in the 1950's. It
was feared that it was going to cause a complete blackout of communications;
possibly worse than that. They did work on that.
Pause.
AL What Jarvis had thought of was probably
the electromagnetic pulse at a time when it wasn't being mentioned in public. I
suppose it may have been appreciated at the Atomic Energy Research
Establishment. The rest of us hadn't heard of it then.
IC What year approximately?
AL Very early 1950's, I think.
IC I thought of entering into a dialogue with
Arnold Lynch about Josephs; that maybe we would get more down onto the tape
about Josephs. You see, quite clearly Arnold is saying that Josephs was
brilliant, or very, very good, in mathematics. He comes from a nothing
educational background, bit finally achieved great
things in mathematics. I, Ivor Catt,
went into research into electromagnetic theory, and after twelve years in that
I stumbled on Heaviside, who had disappeared from the
record for the purpose of electromagnetic theory. I then started reading Heaviside, and discovered that he twice mentioned Energy
Current, as opposed to Electric Current. So I was walking on air that night,
because that meant I had pedigree. Admittedly i
wasn't the first there, which is very nice; to be the first. But also, if there
is someone there before you, you are not out in the cold so much. So then, when
I found about the massive contributions to electromagnetic theory by Heaviside, I had to find out the totality of what Heaviside knew, and also of what his followers knew. That
is why I went after the two Heaviside gurus, which
were Josephs in England, and Gossick in the U.S.A. It
was particularly important to find out whether either of them had noticed
Energy Current. Neither of them had. I spent time with both of them.
AL It surprises me a little.
IC You won't find anything mention of Energy
Current in anything written by Josephs or Gossick.
AL No, I think Josephs would have credited it
to Poynting.
IC No, we're not talking Poynting
Vector. You've got to distinguish between Heaviside-Poynting
Vector and Energy Current because Poynting - my
studies - and this was some years ago - did not know that it travelled at the
speed of light - the Poynting Vector. So you've got
to be careful. Poynting was, as I remember, was
drifting around in that area, but had not mastered it. Now Heaviside;
if it's that signed and sealed, why did Heaviside
never mention it after the first two times? So it is a bit esoteric, and it
maps directly onto my work in high speed logic in Motorola in around 1965. I
had to reinvent, or rediscover Energy Current. Long before I had to do that, I
knew Poynting Vector. So they are not the same thing,
I am now asserting to Arnold Lynch. The thing is that we were making very
significant advances; myself and my two co-researchers
who became co-authors, and we needed to know whether anybody had been there
before. I only cited Energy Current as an example. The other one, of course,
was, how much did Heaviside think about Displacement
Current? Did he know it, and so on? So in that process we put in significant
time on Josephs and Gossick - who died later on. The
big question was, what is the level of competence of
Josephs? One story is that Josephs was the accredited expert on Heaviside, so every few years he would have to produce
another thing that Heaviside knew before Einstein or Dirac or something, like a rabbit out of the hat, in order
to still be in the limelight.
AL You are speaking now of the time when
Josephs had retired. He was under no compulsion to produce anything about Heaviside as long as he was working at Dollis Hill. As far
as I know, he didn't, after about 1935. I don't think he worked on Heaviside's electromagnetism after that, except, of course,
for working with Jarvis on the question of whether there was going to be an
electromagnetic pulse. Josephs was not a man who would have worried in the
least about publishing. From 1960 onwards he just made no effort to publish
anything.
IC You see, that contrasts quite dramatically
with the image, or the reputation of Josephs as inventing discoveries about
what Heaviside had written. The story is that he was
gradually building up Heaviside as the da Vinci of the twentieth century, and in fact he was
there before anybody on Relativity, Quantum Electrodynamics and all the rest. [Tape 367.]
AL Yes. Josephs honestly believed that, I
think.
IC Right. So you're saying; You, Arnold Lynch
are saying, Josephs believed that, but did not assert it.
AL Did not assert it publicly. He wrote it
down. These manuscripts exist. I don't know who's got them.
IC Why did he not assert it publicly?
He didn't seem to be interested in
publication.
IC Now, that conflicts with my recollection,
which is that Josephs has published that article saying in Heaviside's
fourth volume there was this, and that, and the other.
I think you're somewhat wrong on that.
AL Josephs certainly believed that. It would
be interesting to find out how much of that sort of thing he said. I think it
would turn out to be a very small fraction of all that he credited to Heaviside. Yes, he certainly believed that Heaviside had done all these wonderful things.
IC Are we alright to go into what I know
about it? It was intended as your tape.
AL You go on.
IC If you've run out of items; blocks of
information, then I'll go on to what I know. I'll do a
very quick summary of the International Incident. I don't need all of it. I
know, because Gossick told me, that Gossick was a Professor of Music. He then transferred to
Professor of Physics. So when I went to see him - the one time - he had a
violin with wires hanging on it going into an oscilloscope. Publish or Perish,
he conceived the idea of going after Heaviside. But
he regarded himself as not able in electromagnetism. So he would do the
biographical side, and Josephs, who was very kindly towards him, would do the
technical side of Heaviside's electromagnetism. He
came over a few times and stayed with Josephs, who was very, very welcoming.
AL We need a date on
this. Roughly.
IC 1970. But maybe this is wrong. [More like 1974.]
AL After Josephs was
retired.
IC After Josephs was
retired. So now he had his opportunity for his next career advancement; that
is, Gossick, by doing the less technical side - which
he could do - in a biographical. Josephs would supply the technical. So Gossick says they actually completed the book in two parts,
and then it went to the referees of the University of Kentucky. That is, the
University of Kentucky Publishing House. Like Cambridge University Press. And
the referees started asking questions, which Josephs did not answer.
AL No. I can believe that.
IC So now you have this problem of Gossick thinking that he has deferred to Josephs as the
technical expert, but now find he has latched onto someone who's phoney. So the
book was never published. I won't talk about the Burndy
Library, and the sheet of paper, and so on, because I don't think that's
important at this point. But what is important is that Gossick
gets on board with a man with a very big reputation, who agrees to jointly do a
book, and then is in trouble. He had noticed that Josephs' half wasn't
referenced. But the referees demanded the references, and Josephs would not
deliver.
AL That's right. That's the Josephs attitude.
IC Now I love the idea that last week, when
you, Arnold Lynch, said you were giving the keynote lecture on J J Thomson's discovery of the electron one hundred years
ago, because a hundred years ago J J Thomson
discovered the electron; this, by the way is on the twelfth of March.
AL He gave a lecture to the Royal
Institution, but nobody; well, almost nobody, took him seriously.
IC But your lecture is on the twelfth of
March.
AL Oh, mine is, yes.
IC 1997.
AL Yes.
IC And I said to you, Arnold Lynch; "Why
are you giving the lecture?" And your reply was; "Because J J Thomson told me about it." Now let's go over to
Josephs. When the referees of the University of Kentucky Publishing House said;
"What right does Josephs have to assert that Heaviside
knew this, Heaviside said this;" he said,
"Because Searle told me that Heaviside said and
knew that, and also because of Heaviside's
unpublished papers and letters." Gossick was in
a corner, and decided Josephs was fantasising, and part of Gossick's
article which says, at the end, you must take what Josephs says 'cum grano salis', says he doubts
whether these unpublished letters exist. Years later, I stumbled on a mass of Heaviside's unpublished letters, which were given to me by
a relative who said the I.E.E. and Cambridge University and all the rest
couldn't care two hoots about these letters. He said he was about to destroy
then next winter. So I have independent evidence that these unpublished letters
in large quantities exist.
AL They exist, all
right.
IC It is unreasonable to expect Josephs to
keep exact records of which letters, when he is with Searle, who claims he was Heaviside's best friend. And he was with him [Searle] in
the 1950's business. He says; "Searle told me loads of things about Heaviside." Admittedly Josephs never met [Heaviside]. You have this problem. You see, we can to after
Arnold Lynch; that's you, opposite me, after the twelfth of March, and say;
"What is your evidence for J J Thomson on this,
that and the other;" and you say; "J J
Thomson told me." And we will then say.
AL No, I shan't say that. I shall say I am taking this out of J J Thomson's published lectures of 1904.
IC But I'm telling you the concept that you
are not entitled to deliver to us information which you derived directly from J
J Thomson because he told you,
raises the question; Why are you the man who are lecturing on the twelfth of
March? Because you're the only scientist surviving to whom J J Thomson talked about it. So we actually want the direct
contact with J J Thomson through you, and yet, if you
give us that direct contact, you'll be discredited as a scientist, because you
don't have the references. That's the point I wanted to get over to you.
AL Well, fortunately I do have the
references. The oddity is...
IC No, but my point stands,
....
AL The point stands, but it doesn't catch me
out I think.
IC Not you. I'm merely using you as an illustration.
AL Yes. It's a risk I would have been taking
if I hadn't got J J Thomson's own lectures.
IC Look. Who cared about Heaviside
this century? Josephs. Searle. Gossick. Who else?
AL Radley?
IC No. If you go back to what we are talking about when Gossick was going to do that book with Josephs, I had
researched electromagnetic theory for twelve years. I was in a very good
employment. I was looking at the subject. I was publishing; mad I drew nothing
from Heaviside because I had no access to Heaviside. That was the reality at that time. So here; and
we haven't mentioned that when Heaviside's letters
[actually 'fourth volume' etc.] from the I.E.E. were left under a leaky tap in
Wales throughout the second world war, who was it who
got labour in from elsewhere; into the I.E.E., to repair those papers? It was
Josephs. Right? I have photographs.
AL I don't know that one.
IC Right. The point is; what Josephs and Gossick, and Catt, and Searle
were dealing with; they were in a desert. They were the only people there. And now, years later.... And so what's Josephs to draw on?
Josephs bothered to get information in from Searle, about what his best friend
knew and said did. And later on, people can come and say; "He has no references.
So he's fantasising." So we end up with this thesis,
that the closer you are to a man, the less you are able to talk about
him.
AL That is true. Yes.
IC Which is very
interesting, for the record. That
is why the International Incident, which I've only partly mentioned, goes way
beyond Gossick and Josephs and the rest. And
remember, Gossick is dead; Josephs is very old. So
there is no libel... and the President of the I.E.E. got drawn into it. There's
no libel problem. We really can analyse this thing quite freely now. I have
enormous sympathy for every individual drawn into a tragic situation. It is
true. I said dialogue, and it wasn't; it was monologue; I'm sorry.
AL Well, I have been able to check one or two
points. I think this picture of Josephs is building up, and is consistent.
IC That is, your story of Josephs, although
we haven't discussed it for practical purposes, ever, significantly, matches
very well my analysis of Josephs, and his dilemma, and his problems.
AL Yes, I think so.
IC Right. And we come from very different
territory, probably, don't we. I came in because I am after electromagnetic
theory via Heaviside.
AL I just knew him as a colleague.
IC Decades before. One of the points that arise out of this is that the
precepts of scholarship - college, and referencing and so on - actually break
down.
AL Yes. For the interesting reason that you
have just been giving, that you don't keep an original record of all that your
friends tell you.
IC I have the analogy of the man who said;
"Well, of course what Jesus meant about the parable of the sower was so-and-so and so-and so." And you say,
"Well, grounds do you have for that?" And you say, "Well, Jesus
told me about it." So you say, "Well, that's not scholarly at
all." So you say; "No. But what am I supposed to do?" And
Josephs put so much work into it, didn't he.
AL Oh, yes. It was his life from 1960 till 1985 anyway, and
perhaps a few years after that even.
IC And now he gets nobbled
by the referees for a book to be published by the university of Kentucky, if
you please.
AL Well, the same trouble with the one that
he has done for the I.E.E., and which is in their archives. Again, it's without
references. But it's a very consistent story, and where the story can be
checked, it's true.
IC Now, the other dimension I'ld like to add to this is; my
position is that most of twentieth century science is essentially bogus.
Josephs, certainly for a long while, would not know that; would not appreciate
that, because if you come in from a working class background with no education,
you have this ivory tower concept.
AL Yes. I was thinking that last time I met
him he was very interested in philosophy of David Bohm.
He must have developed that interest in philosophy some time during his
retirement, but whether it was in the early days of it, or only after he had
almost given up the mathematical work, I don't know.
IC Now that gives me the hint that I haven's
made my point clear. I have just read Karl Popper, 1982, Quantum
Electrodynamics and the Schism in Physics. He talks about the insanity of
the kind of thing put over by people like Heisenberg, and the terrible muddle
got worse, and so on. Now Josephs, early on, most of the time, would not have
had access to these enormous gulfs within Modern Physics.
AL I don't think he would have been
interested in that sort of gulf, anyway.
IC So he would come in like a babe in the
wood.
AL Yes.
IC And get conned by the prestige of science.
AL Josephs was not a man to be conned. No, I
think he would just have ignored it.
IC I have to also mention that he could be
cynical, with the rest of us. For instance, the way great men used him to write
the mathematical part of their articles. He told me about that.
AL Yes.
IC And that if you look through all these
articles by the great men, that he actually was the hod-carrying
technocrat who wrote the maths. You are confirming that?
AL Yes
IC So, all the same, I assert that, when come
to looking for gravity waves, - he [Josephs] was going to do that at the end of
his garden, when I met him in Whitstable, he would be taking on trust a great
deal of garbage from Modern Physics; a great deal of what I now know is
garbage.
AL Yes, though that is not Quantum
Electrodynamics by a long way. It's something that could have been connected
with electromagnetism. Einstein was always looking for a connection between
electromagnetism and gravitation, and Josephs may have thought that Heaviside had been over the same ground, and might have
found something. But Josephs never wrote down where, or what papers he had got,
that showed that Heaviside was working on
gravitation. But, nevertheless, he credited him with having discovered
Relativity theory before Einstein.
IC Yes. And of course problem with that is
it's also attributed to Poincare and so on. And also
I personally am thoroughly dissatisfied with all of that
scene; as of course was Einstein. Einstein was not comfortable along with all
those guys, and he said so. Einstein is the one you have to respect, among all
those guys; Bohr, Heisenberg, and all the rest. Popper is interesting. I've
only just read Popper 1982. I read two books on philosophy by Heisenberg, and I
was appalled. The stuff was really juvenile. I thought, "What's going on
here?" Then, years after that, I read Popper 1982, saying the same thing.
He says these great scientists are incompetent when it comes to philosophy.
That's Popper.
AL That's been said a good many times, of
course.
IC Well, not to my
knowledge.
AL Oh, yes. This goes back to the 1930's, for example, when
people like Jeans were claiming to be stating philosophical ideas, and the
professional philosophers came down on them. [tape
505. End first side. 45 mins.
There are two sides. Transcribed by Ivor Catt, 2feb99.]
IC Second of February '97. I quote Jeans on pitchforking
the square root of minus one into the relationship between space and time. It's
appalling stuff. Well, of course, the other thing is Minkowski
plot, and you're not allowed to talk about the sign of time, because it's quite
clear to me that if you walk across town for one hour and you gain four miles,
you lose the hour. There's a minus sign there. You're not allowed to put that
into Maxwell's Equations you see, because that gets rid of - the whole thing's
a mess. [If you put the minus sign in, the equations become trivial
tautologies.] If you try to push too hard at the kind of
great big ivory towers that have been created in twentieth century science.
Now go back to Josephs, you see, who comes from a small background, and is
gradually making his way, and he begins to be respected in maths. Now he's
broadening across to electromagnetic theory, and he realised that Heaviside was Number One when other people didn't; which
was a great achievement. But then ....
AL You say
"When other people didn't." There were other people. There's a man I
share an office with in University College, and it's Cullen. As an
undergraduate he discovered Heaviside. He bought
copies of the Heaviside books when he could find them
on secondhand bookstores, and he regards Heaviside as having been an important pioneer. But he's one
of the people who say that.."Well, it's out of
date now, because we can use other methods which are easier to justify
theoretically."
IC Now you're talking Operational Calculus. Right.
AL No, I'm talking electromagnetic theory.
Cullen's a great Electromagnetic Theory man.
IC And Cullen can
say that Heaviside's out of date, which to me is a
disaster.
AL Heaviside's
mathematical techniques are out of date, but his ideas and the theory that he
developed of electromagnetic fields, as far as he did develop it, were sound.
IC So, I think the picture of how Josephs got
drawn into a quagmire; do you think it becomes clear from what's gone onto this
tape?
AL It's possible, yes.
IC And what led to the conflict between Gossick and Josephs, and neither was to blame?
AL Yes. I do see the point; where the trouble
was between Gossick and Josephs. I hadn't heard of
this before.
IC You hadn't heard of the International
Incident?
AL Oh, I've heard of the International
Incident.
IC Well, that's what it is.
AL All right, it's
one aspect of it.
IC Oh, you'd heard about the Burndy Library
AL I didn't know that there had been a joint
endeavour between Gossick and Josephs, and that
Josephs had let the side down by not having references available.
IC There is an unpublished book.
AL Now, that I
didn't know.
IC And, I told you a week ago when you were
here, that I'm in the room with my then wife, Josephs and his second wife, and
my wife says to Josephs; "Well, you can refute these charges; the charges
that you invented this stuff that Heaviside - that
you didn't find it in Heaviside's lost fourth volume.
You must refute this." And Josephs said; "Why?" And my wife
said; "Well, your reputation." He said, "Well.... "
AL He wouldn't mind.
IC So here you have a seventy or eighty year
old man. He's not fixated on his image in thirty years' time. Which totally
contradicts the whole genetic thing, that we're all aiming at
immortality, doesn't it.
AL It does rather; yes.
IC Because he doesn't care; and that was
magnificent. Absolutely. And I have it on tape
somewhere. That is absolutely magnificent. That man challenging the whole
business of - your reputation lives after you. I have to mention in that
context that Gossick later wrote, and I think
published, but I have letters from Gossick to Josephs
saying "I now realise that some of the claims you made for Heaviside were valid; the ones which I earlier believed
were invalid. So there is some backing away by Gossick
on some of it. I have lots of Gossick letters.
AL What I said, and would say again, was that
where you can check the Josephs biography of Heaviside,
it's right. But there is a whole lot of it that isn't
attributable, and we don't know where it came from.
IC But you see the trouble for me is that
Josephs keeps sending me the same thing again and again, beautifully written,
about Godel's theorem, and that, for instance, Heaviside pre-empted Godel. My
position is, I go into science, and I find it's a gimcrack array of bits and
pieces, including Godel's theorem and Uncertainty
Principle and a bit of statistics and a bit of electromagnetism, sort of glued
together, and then intoned into a liturgy. And I say, Well,
so what if - 'cause you can never find out exactly what Godel's
theorem is anyway - so what if Heaviside was there
before Godel, do I respect Heaviside
more or less? 'Cause Godel is one of those guys, like
you talk on TV about you've suddenly discovered this brilliant scientist from Sidi Birani from 1570 or
something which had this profound insight. And somehow it's glued onto me,
trying to build high speed computers. The trouble with
Josephs; he associates Godel's stuff with Ivor Catt's stuff. Now I
know enough of Godel to say, "Hey, don't write a
page which has Catt in it and Godel."
Somehow Catt confirms Godel
or Godel confirms Catt. You
see, Godel is a theory is incomplete, or it is
internally inconsistent.
AL I've come to accept that sort of thing. I
suppose it's probably to do with the fact that I've been working as an
experimenter now for about now for about sixty years, and I've come to believe
that the whole thing is, as you say, a bit shaky. It's nice to be able to put
some things together and find that they do make sense. But it's all like
working on an infinite jigsaw puzzle, and I don't expect to see the truth in my
time. I might see a little more truth than I saw sixty years ago. [tape count 114]
IC Yes, but does Josephs realise the
political significance of Godel? Heisenberg comes in,
and I've studied how Heisenberg got away with it - an irrational science. That
was a reaction, because the Germans suddenly found they had lost the war, and
they reacted against rationality and science. So Heisenberg had to invent a new
kind of science which was irrational, uncertain and so on. And Godel is ... it doesn't matter whether Godel's
right or wrong. What matters is whether true science is going to survive. If
you let Uncertainty, Wave-particle dualism, Godel's
Theorem go washing about in there, you can then say that science is merely a
religion. You know there's a collapse in the number of people taking A level Physics? And there's a collapse in the people taking
degrees. Theocharis said, if we go on like this, with
all this nonsense - he said it in Nature ten years ago - there'll be a collapse
in funding for science, so that's the role I see for Godel.;
AL I'm as worried as anybody about the poor
teaching of Physics in schools, and about the restriction of the A level
syllabus, which is getting less and less.
IC But also the introduction of mysticism
into the centre of Modern Physics, which is commented on by Popper, for
instance, in 1982, and by Shirley Williams. Shirley Williams said the writing's
on the wall if you carry on like this.
AL Well, I'm more of an engineer than I am a
physicist these days, and engineering is not suffering from mysticism, is it.
IC Yes, it is. Take Scarrott,
who's just recently died, and for this purpose he's Establishment. We had the
electron. You reduce the power of the bistable of the
memory element in a chip, and you reduce it so that in the end you find there's
one electron popping through every five minutes. How the hell's the thing going
to remember from one electron to the next? I said to Scarrott;
"Does it concern you that you're only being pumped up once every so
often?" "No." The point is,
wave-particle dualism is of no relevance when you're doing something real. But
it does get in the way.
AL I can't agree to that, because there are
experiments which you can actually carry out which demonstrate the electron
[acts] as a wave. And it can also exist as a particle.
IC Not [a particle] in my
experience. Remember that we have
never, either of us, shaken hands with an electron in our lives, or introduced
one to a friend.
AL It's no use trying to think what one looks
like.
IC But I'm telling you that if you're in
what's supposed to be a practical science, and you have a bistable
which exists because there's current flowing, and as the current gets less and
less, you're not allowed to say that that proves the particles, if they exist,
are smaller you thought they were. That's not a healthy technology, let alone a
science.
AL I would think of it as something that
should be overtaken by noise.
IC The other thing, you see, when you went
into alpha particles, going and knocking out the memory bit; we've got to have
rational science behind our engineering. Otherwise people like me are trying to
engineer, [and] just get trampled on by people who are talking nonsense. I
don't think you should hold onto the idea that these guys aren't a menace;
these guys who come up with these weird, muddled notions, as Popper says they
have. He says that Heisenberg's muddle - if you can't measure a thing, it
doesn't exist; the concept that science is about things that are measurable.
Therefore in Heisenberg, so long as you can gather it, you get on the right the
kilogram, the gram, the microgram, the picogram; but
the femtogram is over on the left along with emotion;
because you can't measure it. The answer is; Science is not about things that
can be measured; it's about the class of things that can be measured. An absolutely elementary error which is wreaking havoc.
AL My work is about things that can be
measured, subject to an uncertainty. It's good practice nowadays to try to
state the uncertainty of any measurement you make.
IC The heresy that they got away with early
this century in a very muddled way was that if you can't measure it, it doesn't
exist.
AL Oh, I'm not going to say that.
IC Well, you don't even know what they say.
For forty years I've failed to find out what they say. Now I believe I've got
down to it. Popper said he discussed it with Einstein and with the rest of
them. To the extent that we can get anything....
AL But Einstein was
no philosopher.
IC The other point was the idea that you can
have a science about things that are intrinsically un-understandable. That's
what Popper jumped on. I'm building high speed computers which are going to
cost millions, for customers. I must have a barrier between people who are
carrying on like that.
AL Yes.
IC In fact. I can't even publish, because they control my
journal.
AL Well, I reckon that I could publish on
that. I do have views on that, as it happens. I was taught - you might be
surprised to know who taught me - it was C. E. M. Joad
-
IC In philosophy?
AL Yes.
IC Was he the man who was caught on the train
not paying his fare?
AL That's right.
IC And was he minister of the church?
AL No.
IC Oh, that's somebody else.
AL I was taught about the English
empiricists, and I recognised the philosophy of Locke has been the philosophy
of the working physicist. I don't know whether that means anything to you.
IC No.
AL Well, Joad used
to say that Locke was undoubtedly wrong. But Locke believed that all that we
know about the outside world is what comes to us through our senses and through
the instruments that we can make, which receive something from the outside
world; turn it into sense data which we can understand. Locke believed that the
real world, which we couldn't know, was in a one to one correspondence with
what we knew about through our sense data. That is, I believe, working
philosophy of every scientists if he examines what he
is doing. The real world's is something utterly different what our senses tell
us. It consists chiefly of empty space with little points in it supported
stably in it by electromagnetic forces. But what se don't know is whether there
are other characteristics of that real world which are not responded to by our
senses. That is something which I feel I've got to leave open. The philosophers
can't do anything much with it. They've got no more access to that world than I
have. But I can't rule it out.
IC So if I could just finish by saying
Josephs is a martyr to confusion at quite a deep level, of other people; of the
community; and so was Gossick. It's a great tragedy
that he put in all that effort, and ended up with a tainted reputation. he was a victim of circumstance.
IC This is Ivor Catt. 5pm. Arnold Lynch has just left. he
arrived at 2.30, so he's been here two and a half hours. I think that was a
very useful talk, because we got something on the early Josephs, and also I am
very relieved to have got down my analysis about how Josephs and Gossick, and everybody else; the President of the I.E.E.,
and everybody, were trapped in what is actually a dislocation within the
structure of scientific ethos about publication; referencing and so on. I have
never read anything on those lines. Of particular interest [tape count 230] is
the idea that those who put the greatest effort into the Heaviside
saga ended up with their reputations most damaged; that is, Josephs and Gossick, whereas the President of the I.E.E., who did very
little, was hardly damaged; and neither was the I.E.E. This tape does not
include what Arnold Lynch thought was the International Incident, which was the
allegation that a document had been stolen, and then presented to the Burndy Library [Norwalk], which is quite a straightforward
story. I can tell it another time.
Arnold Lynch left at around 4.30 on 2 feb 1997. Perhaps I should mention
that he is in his eighties. It is now 11.30 p.m., and I will tell you the story
of the International Incident which Arnold Lynch, apparently, knows about.
However, I haven't discussed it with him.
I think it's on tape that Gossick
was a Music Professor and transferred across to Physics, but regarded himself
as not expert in high mathematics, electromagnetic theory, and so on. So,
because of Publish or Perish, or for other reasons, he needed to publish. He
happened upon Oliver Heaviside. In pursuing Oliver Heaviside, he got photocopies of all the documents, or a
lot of the documents, from the I.E.E. in Britain, and proceeded to study. Then
he heard that the English expert on Heaviside was H.
J. Josephs. So in due course he came to England and visited Josephs in Kent.
Josephs was very hospitable. They got on well. The idea of a joint book arose.
The division of labour would be that Josephs would do the technical part, and Gossick would do the biographical part. So Gossick went back home and proceeded to write the
biographical part. In due course, the book went to the referees of the
publishing house of the University of Kentucky, which was Gossick's
university. The referees came back with questions about the technical half of
the book, asking about references. So this went to Josephs, and Josephs would
not supply the references. [Note by Ivor Catt on 18mar2007. Catt never met Searle, but heard (and tape recorded)
Josephs talking about his work with Searle. There seems to be confusion here in
what follows in the transcript taken directly from the tape recording, from the
section made by me after Lynch had left my home. I suggest that this is a quote
from Josephs, which is a repeat from the same statement earlier in this
document. Ivor Catt
18mar07] I know this because Searle told
me; that Searle's best friend Heaviside had said
this, that and the other. Josephs also said that he had read great numbers of
very long letters written by Heaviside which were in
private collections. While Gossick was visiting
Josephs, Josephs gave him a single sheet of calculations written by Oliver Heaviside. So Gossick went back
to the New World with this highly prized document. Some time later, Gossick presented this one page to the Burndy
Library, Norwalk Connecticut, which is the high prestige library of scientific
memorabilia. It was published in their annual report, that
Professor Gossick had presented them this sheet
written by Heaviside, and it was illustrated in the Burndy Report, which I have never seen, by the way. The
I.E.E. read the report, and wrote to the Burndy
Library saying this sheet had been stolen from the Heaviside
Collection in the I.E.E. Library. There were two sides to this International
Incident. One was the part which Arnold Lynch did not know until today, which
was the project of a joint book, which was completely written. It was damaging
to Gossick's career, that as a result of the discord
over sources for the technical side, the book could never be published. There
is also [tape count 291] the half which presumably Arnold Lynch does know,
although we haven's discussed it, which was the alleged theft of one sheet of
paper written by Heaviside, presented to Gossick by Josephs, who then presented it to the Burndy Library, who then published in their Annual Report
with an illustration, leading to a letter from the I.E.E. in England saying it
was stolen. So Gossick was in trouble from two
things; one is the doubtful book, and the other is that he had handled stolen
property. So he, or the University, brought in their legal advisers. This led
to a meeting in the I.E.E. where Gossick was
interviewed, and separately, in a different room, Josephs was interviewed. The
President of the I.E.E. was involved. But the substance of the interview, as I
recall it, as it was recounted to me by Josephs, was the book with the doubtful
sources. That is, was Josephs fabricating material, or inventing things about Heaviside, or were they true? First of all, I went and
interviewed Josephs and put him on tape. So did my co-author Malcolm Davidson.
We went to him in Whitstable, and maybe recorded him for five hours or so, for
other reasons. He never said an ill word about Gossick,
although the International Incident had already occurred. He did tell me that
when the cache of documents was discovered under the floorboards in Heaviside's house after his death, some time after, and
then were put on a train up to London, he and Wright, the librarian of the
I.E.E. in Savoy Place, London, went down to the station and got these
documents, and Wright, who was an appointee by - I think - Rayleigh
[AL says definitely not Rayleigh], or the man that Arnlod Lynch mentions earlier in this tape - Wright was not
a librarian, and was put into the I.E.E. from Dollis Hill. When Wright saw
these documents, he was appalled that they were dirty, and he wanted to destroy
them; that is, documents found under Heaviside's
floorboards. But Josephs countered that, and insisted that they be retained.
The other point about Josephs is that, during the second
world war, all the Heaviside material in the
I.E.E. Savoy Place was sent off for safe keeping to Wales. It was left under a
leaky tap. When it came back, the person who bothered to try to retrieve these
documents was Josephs. He told me that he brought in worker[s] from Dollis Hill
staff, down to the I.E.E., to go through the painstaking work of separating
these damp sheets and trying to recover what they contained. I have photographs
of that process in my house here. So it really happened. So, on the one hand,
you have the Chief Librarian in the I.E.E. wanting to destroy masses of Heaviside documents, and Josephs working with non-I.E.E.
money to restore documents that have been damaged by the I.E.E.'s
negligence; and on the other hand you have the I.E.E. writing to the Burndy Library to say that one sheet had been stolen from
the I.E.E., and the implication is that it taken by Josephs and then given to Gossick. I think if you want to understand what's going on
here, it's useful to think of everybody being totally indifferent to
electromagnetic theory, to Heaviside, except for
Josephs, Gossick, and those indifferent people have
the gall to muscle in and claim that somebody stole a document. [tape count 346]. I went to see Josephs, maybe twice at
Whitstable, also went to see him perhaps twice in Sussex after he had moved. he told me some interesting things. He said that after Heaviside's death, Heaviside's
brother proceeded to sell sheets of paper with Heaviside's
calculations on them. Further, when Charles, I think it was, ran out of these
sheets, he then concocted some sheets. Further, when Heavside
decided a lot of calculations were wrong, he would draw a vertical line through
the middle of the sheet. The sheet of paper he gave to Gossick,
because he said he did give a sheet of paper to Gossick,
had the vertical line through; meaning that if it was written by Heaviside, that Heaviside had
decided that all the calculations were incorrect. My position is that I believe
that nobody except Heaviside and Gossick
cared, because I know that Heaviside disappeared from
the record. When I stumbled on Heaviside, it was only
after I had been researching electromagnetic theory for twelve years, and I had
no evidence that Heaviside had made any contribution.
He had disappeared from the record, as did O'Rahilley;
1935, 1938, who is the other one of the four greatest contributors to
electromagnetic theory. If you look up the index of books on electromagnetic
theory you will find Heaviside is only mentioned in
one during a period of fifty years. I phoned the author of that book, who is, I
think, Cullwick; he was then living down near Dover.
I said, "Have you read Heaviside?" He said;
"No. I only read sections of Heaviside in
Whitakers's "History of the Aether and
Electricity" [pub. Nelson 1910 and again 1951]. So even the man who mentions Heaviside
had not read Heaviside. That is the context in
which you have to get yourself when you are thinking about the devotion of
Josephs to Heaviside's electromagnetic theory, and of
Gossick to Heaviside's electromagnetic
theory. At this same period, Heaviside's Operational
Calculus survived. There is a book, or there are books published with dates
like 1935 on Heaviside's Operational Calculus. But
the neglect was Heaviside's electromagnetic theory,
which was essentially total. I am very willing to believe that Josephs was the
man who made the effort to try to save Heaviside's
materials. I also know that when he told me to look at Josephs' biography of Heaviside - not the same one as the University of Kentucky one
- in the I.E.E. Library, I found it had gone. I phoned him up, and he said,
"Yes, they're always throwing that out. I keep putting in a copy and then
they throw that out." That's the I.E.E.; the I.E.E. that told Burndy that one sheet of paper had been stolen [from them].
Josephs then gave me, as I believe, a copy of that biography. I believe in my
extensive files there is a copy of Josephs' brief biography of Heaviside. Now as to Josephs' failure to provide references
to his claims about what Heaviside knew and what Heaviside discovered. Josephs continually said that there
was a fourth volume of Heaviside's
"Electromagnetic Theory " which was never
published. Heaviside wrote about writing a fourth
volume, which was not published. Josephs would periodically publish - say in
1970 - that looking in these unpublished papers he had found further material
like Heaviside had pre-empted Godel
for Godel's Theorem, or foresaw Quantum
Electrodynamics, or all the various things; the high points of this century. I
am not sure that those are the ones. Certainly you can read that Heaviside was a forgotten genius, and the person who has
researched it is Josephs, and he has discovered this, that and the other. When
I took Gratten-Guinness down, who's a History of
Science man, to look at this assortment of sheets which is supposed to be the
fourth volume, but I took him down in 1980, or maybe in 1985, Gratten-Guinness very rapidly went through them and said
they were documents about, for instance, the third volume on electromagnetic
theory [which is published]. But when Josephs was challenged to produce
references and sources for the Gossick-Josephs book,
he said that it's the fourth volume that he is drawing on; also what Searle
told him - and Searle was Heaviside's best friend -
and also extensive private collections of letters written by Heaviside. Josephs did not comprehend that the scientific
procedure in research is to be meticulous about your sources. However, the
scientific procedure about research may include the concept that when you're
listening to Jesus, you should not report what he said, because then you have no source; you have no record. The
same with Heaviside. So Searle, having had
extensive times with Heaviside, as everyone has to
agree, would have gained a lot of information about Heaviside's
ideas on everything, and when he worked with Josephs to produce the centenary
volume in 1950, he would have told Josephs an enormous amount. Now during a
series of vicissitudes, I ended up in possession of the letters Heaviside wrote to Searle. So I do have those. But they are
late. Then again, Searle's friendship with Heaviside
was late. If these letters do not contain the kind of stuff Josephs is talking
about, you have to bear in mind that Heaviside did
not think highly of Searle as a scientist. There are various sources for that.
It is argued that - and I forget who told me this - [actually my co-author Mike
Gibson] - the crunch material would be in Heaviside's
letters to Bjerknes in Scandinavia. It would not be
in his letters to Searle, and certainly in what I have read, in the dialogue
between Heaviside and Searle, I see Heaviside thinking of Searle as rather junior. So it is
quite possible that Heaviside would not have bothered
with crucial new ideas in his letters to Searle. Also, confirming what Gossick first doubted; Josephs' claim that there were
extensive collections of letters privately held which Josephs had seen, but
that he doesn't now have access to, when he was asked to show sources for the
joint book; I later came into possession of a large amount of Heaviside memorabilia which was in the hands of the
Reverend Timmins, Searle's final surviving descendent
[something like a nephew; Searle had no surviving children], who said that he
had phoned Cambridge University Library, and phoned the I.E.E., and they did
not want to have any truck with what Timmins said was
two cubic feet of Searle's documentation relating to Heaviside;
that is, the tie that E squared gave to Heaviside and
that he painted these little whatevers on - the white
dots - and post cards from Fitzgerald and people to Searle about how to deal
with Heaviside's financial problems, and also one
hundred, two hundred letters by Heaviside sent to
Searle, which I received. So I have clear evidence that the powers that be made
essentially no effort to get hold of, or to save, or to look after carefully, Heaviside's memorabilia; the same I.E.E. which wrote to the
Burndy Library to say that one sheet of paper had
been stolen. [tape count 436.] Now, the question
arises; Why should Josephs know that when you write scientific material, you
should have all this cross-referencing and sourcing. He had left school at the
age of fourteen or whatever, and he finally rose to a high position, as Arnold
Lynch is confirming. But who told him how you proceed? Of course, against that,
you could, Who told Ivor Catt the procedures, because I am sure it wasn't in my
degree course. But then again, if Josephs, off his own bat, goes off and
becomes obsessed with a man that everybody's forgotten, where is he to put his
effort? If all the evidence is that scientists don't want to know about Heaviside, he himself will gather as much information on Heaviside as he can for posterity, and in doing it, maybe
he things that the information about what Heaviside
knew and thought is more important than the proof that that was what Heaviside knew and thought. I do know that whereas Gossick wrote; "You must take what Josephs says about
what Heaviside knew; Godel's
Theorem or Quantum Electrodynamics or Relativity; the Heaviside
knew all these before anybody else did - with a pinch of salt," on the
other hand, I do have a letter from Gossick to
Josephs, saying [something like]; "I now realise that some of what I
believe you invented, in fact you did not invent, because I have now seen
documentation proving it," because Josephs also gave me a great deal of
paperwork on one of my visits to him. So I have evidence that Gossick backed away from discrediting Josephs. The moral
from the point of view of History of Science is that those who put the most
effort, as true scientists, into saving the record, saving documentation,
saving materials, understanding, were the ones whose reputations were damaged,
whereas officials in the I.E.E. who said a sheet of paper had been stolen are
essentially nameless and blameless. They were the ones who did not put in the
effort, and you notice their reputations are unsullied. That is a very
interesting conclusion from the case of what Josephs called "The
International Incident". I went to St. Louis; I was flown to St. Louis for
a conference on what is called "The Glitch", and decided on the way
back to stop off at the university of Kentucky, or
Lexington, or somewhere. Gossick was at the airport
to meet me. he took me to some institution, where he
proceeded to recount this appalling story of the International Incident; the
claim of theft, and so on, which I had heard nothing of from Josephs. So
Josephs was totally loyal to Gossick. Gossick told me about how damaging it had been for his
career, and how difficult. The date of this is before the date when Gossick wrote to Josephs saying he now realised he had gone
too far in discrediting Josephs. Then, some years after that, Gossick died. So I am in pole position on this, because I
had, let's say three hours, four hours with Gossick
in his home town, where he went through the scandal from his point of view. I
have also had interview with Josephs on it on at least two occasions. Of
course, the dramatic event was when there were four of us in the room; Josephs'
second wife - his first wife had already died when I first met him - I met the
second wife before they married, and then they moved to Sussex, when my wife
said to Josephs, "Well, you must refute these claims that you had done it
wrong if you have the evidence." There were four of us in the room and
Josephs said; "Why?" She said "Well, your reputation, for
posterity," and it was quite clear he was not concerned about his
reputation for posterity. That's a very important factor to hold against the
concept that in order to gain fame Josephs persisted in wanting to be the man
who discovered even more hidden depths on Heaviside's
later writings. The other factor is, according to Josephs, Heaviside
was ahead of the pack on Relativity and whatever - discovering all these
things; and most of these things I have no respect for anyway because they are
part of the nonsense that masqueraded as the latest science in the first half
of this century, and then caused so much trouble; that is, Modern Physics. So
Josephs probably didn't realise that the twentieth century botched its science,
whereas of course Heaviside is nineteenth century
science which I have the highest regard for. [tape
count 487] Then we have this problem; why should Josephs have had such a high
regard for the great man, and not questioned the idiocies within, say,
Heisenberg and other great names. Why should he respect them so much, and yet
say, as he said to me, that he was the man who did the maths at Dollis Hill,
and the great men would come to him to get him to do the maths for their
papers, which then would be credited to them? So there are paradoxes about
Josephs, but so there should be in someone in that position. He was in a
paradoxical situation from about three points of view. That's midnight on the
second of February 1997, and I'm very relieved to have this down, because I am
the only person with this information, and it was most important to have it on
record. So I do intend to distribute this a bit. I think it's a very important
element in the History of Science. That is, the tragedy of how the leading
players in this were sullied through no fault of their own. [tape
count 498.] Transcribed from the audio tape by Ivor Catt on 5feb99.
Audio tapes held by Lynch, Catt, Lenore Simon, Chief Archivist of the I.E.E.
Lenore Simon said it should be transcribed,
which it now is, two years later. Written version held on Ivor
Catt's website,
www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/
@@@@@@@@@@@
Written on 12 April 2011.
Dear Paul Nahin,
The reason why I sent you
an email yesterday was to ask you to somment on my
recent article. http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/x111.htm .
Please don't let what follows deflect you from commenting on my article.
I touched briefly on finding you
referred to me and to Dr. Arnold Lynch in your book. You mention that I
underestimated Gossick's ability in electromagnetic
theory. I now remember what happened, which will explain why you concluded that
I was wrong in my appraisal of Gossick, in view of
what you know about his technical expertise. I have now searched for "An
International Incident", http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/z010.htm ,
which I transcribed a long time ago and which is very lengthy. I hope you don't
mind if I write to you from memory without first reading that lengthy document.
You will of course be able to compare what I remember with the content of that
document, which I hardly remember at all.
I had travelled to St. Louis to
attend the one and only conference on "The Glitch", a suppressed
problem with digital computers. I was invited, and my fare was paid for by the
Pentagon, because I was the onl;y
one who had succeeded in publishing on it, http://www.ivorcatt.co.uk/97sglit5.htm , because I gave
it a misleading title. On the way back to England I diverted to Kentucky to
visit the other expert on Heaviside, Gossick. He met me at the airport, and, surprisingly, took
me to his university, which I think was deserted. There he told me the
extraordinary Gossick-Josephs story. Although I
had previously spent a great deal of time with Josephs (in part of our study of
Heaviside), Josephs had never mentioned it.
Gossick said he looked into Heaviside,
and found that Josephs was his expert. He visited Josephs in England, and
proposed a joint book, where he would do the biographical part and Josephs
would do the technical part. Gossick said this was
because he, Gossick, was not the technical expert.
(This compares with your detailing his technical expertise. My source was
otherwise, straight from the horse's mouth. My only information as to Gossick's technical expertise was from Gossick
himself. I never checked on this.) Gossick said that
the book was completed and was with the referees for the university publishers,
where it went through siomething like Peer Review.
The reviewers asked for sources for Josephs' various assertions as to Heaviside having been the first in various later scientific
breakthroughs. Josephs refused to give sources, saying he got the information
from various letters he had seen written by Heaviside
to others. He said there were many such letters. (My later coming across 100
unknown letters from Heaviside to Searle tends to
support this idea.) Gossick said this created a
big professional problem for him, because he was caught as co-author of a book
where the other half had been written by someone without meeting the usual
academic requirements as to sources cited. I vaguely remember the Burndy Library part of the "incident", which is
also in http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/z010.htm .
The Gossick-Josephs
clash was the result of Professional (Gossick)
meeting Amateur (Josephs) who left school very young, but made it up along with
academic experts, but lacking some of their rudimentary principles, like giving
proper sources. However, he was drawn in because the Professionals were
indifferent to the case of Heaviside, and he found
himself shouldering the burden without their help - until Gossick
came along. I also know about the indifference of the "Professionals"
to Heaviside sionce the IEE
did niot care about getting Heaviside's
100 letters to his friend Searle. The IEE also twice detroyed a book by Josephs about Heaviside
which he filed in their library. When I told him it was missing, he
refused to send them a third copy.
Ivor Catt 12 April 2011.