Talk:Ivor Catt

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Contents

[edit] LC to Nigel

Nigel, you will know (by your involvement with Catt) that to convince people of your beliefs it takes a great deal of patience and a necessity to go very slowly. We may not agree with what we THINK youre saying , but are we understanding you right? You may well be correct, but you have to convince us of our erroneous thinking.8-)--Light current 22:34, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

Light current, Thank you! There are some facts with plenty of evidence, falsely dismissed as personal opinion/belief or pet theory. On the topic of being lucid, I try my best to update and improve anything I can, and I answer any questions asked of me. You cannot simultaneously ignore other people's work when presented to you and complain about censorship. The two actions are mutually incompatible, it is sheer hypocrisy. So I do study a lot of stuff sent to me. Catt does not do this, and this is a major cause of dispute between us. Catt was quite proud to tell me that after 20 or more years of association with Professor Hillman of Surrey University, neither understands each other's work. Catt cites this as an example that you can still get along without bothering to grasp one another. I don't have any sympathy at all. Darwin took great pains writing and editing the evidence in Origin of Species in a lucid way over a twenty-year period. Obviously this is something worth trying. There is very little quality information available. But as soon as you start writing a lucid textbook on this stuff, you are faced with a lot of difficult decisions requiring time and thought. I don't think Catt put enough into writing Electromagnetism 1 which was ridiculed by Lago in the IEE review. You have to understand that there are many problems.
For example, if you have an electron in space, the exchange radiation around it causes the negative "electric field". It is the exchange radiation which indicates to you the presence of the electron, not the electron core itself. So for two types of electric charge (positive and negative) there are going to be two types of exchange radiation, one positive and one negative? Is this true? If so, what does this say about the nature of the exchange radiation? That it is charged and not uncharged? You can find nothing about the dynamics for quantum field theory forces in textbooks. See, for instance, the up to date and comprehensive 615 page QFT book by Prof. Mark Srednicki here: [1].
Recently I found an error in 1st edition of the textbook Introduction to Quantum Field Theory on arXiv.org which stated the charge of the electron as shielded by the virtual electron-positron shell around it has a charge relative charge 7% higher at 92 GeV energy of collision than at 0.511 MeV. The authors actually had the equation, with 0.511 Mev and 92 GeV cutoffs, shown to be equal to the experimentally known charge. Putting the numbers into the equation shows it is totally wrong, off by a factor of 100 or so. Why? I asked Lubos Motl the string theorist [2]. It turns out that that textbook (1st ed) was wrong as it ignored all the particle creation-annihilation loops which can be created at energies between 0.511 MeV and 92 GeV. Motl emailed the Professor then replied: "Prof. Alvarez-Gaume has written me that it was a pedagogical simplification, which I fully understand and endorse, and in a future version of the text, they will have not only the right numbers but even the threshold corrections!" The second edition [3] corrects the error, with a footnote thanking Motl. Fair enough, but you can see the problems I have in getting hard facts out of quantum field theory. It is very clear to me now that the renormalization cutoffs in quantum field theory are simply due to the fact that the field at high energy density (near the electron or other particle core) actually creates the particles. (The measurement of distance in terms of collision energy, 0.511 MeV to 92 GeV, adds to the confusion. The mechanism for the creation of charge pairs exists around the electron core even if there is no collision, and the mechanism is the field energy. The reason why higher energy charge pairs appear involved at higher collision energy is simply that at higher energy you penetrate more closely to the real particle core, where the field is stronger and where there are normally more exotic charge loops being formed - regardless of whether a collision is occurring or not. So it is vital to convert units of collision energy cutoffs into the less obfuscating units of real distance from the middle of a particle. The upper energy cutoff then corresponds to the distance near the real particle core where you are measuring the increased charge within the polarization veil, whereas the lower energy cutoff corresponds to the maximum distance from the real particle core where the electromagnetic field has sufficient energy density to be capable of first creating and then polarizing virtual charges. This is the meaning of the renormalization of charges in QFT.) If the field were merely polarizing an infinite aether, the polarization of vacuum virtual charge would extend far enought to completely cancel out all real charges completely. This does not happen, because the vacuum is not full of virtual charges, just exchange radiation. None of these physical facts are bona fide subjects for discussion in quantum field theory, where extra dimensional speculation reins. This is apparently why the subject remains so illucid, even to the textbook authors. The basic facts of QFT which have empirical evidence are very strong indeed, but the mathematical trivia submerges the physical facts and it is taking a lot of effort to break it down [4]. Really it is not up to me to sort out things like the presentation of QFT, but if it will help make those people listen I will do so. Nigel 172.215.63.55 18:03, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Kevin to Nigel

Nigel, if the velocity of propagation of a transmission line were independent of the construction of the line, manufacturers of coaxial cable would not need to supply the inormation on their datasheets. You are confusing the speed with which the change in the magnetic field spreads when you slide a fridge magnet around your fridge door with the speed that the fridge magnet itself is moving. -- Kevin Brunt 12:32, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

Kevin, we're talking about conductors with vacuum as the insulator; coaxial has a speed equal to light speed for the dielectric (the dielectric contains plastic insulator with a molecular dielectric that becomes polarised in an electric field). For vacuum, the velocity in a transmission line is always 300,000 km/s, and changing the construction of the line only alters the characteristic impedance and resistance. Make the conductors thicker and you can decrease the resistance (ohms per m of length) and impedance (ohms). Look at the diagram on the page: radiation is emitted perpendicular to the direction electrons are accelerated to cause a drift current. So you are confused! Before you go on that the electrons are already moving, the electrons inside me are already moving before I begin to walk but I still have to accelerate them to move (the net velocity before is zero, and after the wavefront passes the net drift velocity is 1 mm/s or so for 1 amp, which implies an acceleration). Nigel 172.212.60.237 21:32, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

Nigel, this is appears to be a useful link - Electromagnetic waves, James B Calvert Basically, it demonstrates that if the relative permeability of the conductors is sufficiently close to unity that it can be disregarded, and if the current is oscillating at a high enough frequency that the skin effect is sufficiently pronounced that the thickness of the skin can also be disregarded that the fields around a pair of parallel cylindrical conductors are independent of the diameter of the conductors and is thus identical to the situation where the conductors' diameter is reduced to zero, at which point we have the purely theoretical situation of current flow in free space. I will concede that my mathematics do not run to demonstrating whether the argument applies to the situation where the conductors are parallel plates of arbitrary width.

However, it is well worth noting that Prof Calvert's analysis starts from the premise that there is charge in the conductor, so that the whole exercise is highly inimical to Catt's "there is no charge" position. Note also Calvert's comment "The Poynting vector must be interpreted and used with care" which also has application when considering Catt's writing.

There is an curious aside in the article as well. Calvert is an "associate professor emeritus of engineering", which means that he has retired, and is likely of the same general vintage as Catt. Calvert clearly has a bee in his bonnet about the SI scheme of units, which he likes to refer to in such ways "the Giorgi or MKS units". He would appear to have been taught in the CGS system of units, and so has acquired a variant of the "anti-metrication" attitude. I suspect some parallels with Catt's anti-academic, anti-calculus prejudices. -- Kevin Brunt 23:06, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The July chapters

Kevin, Prof Calvert's argument as you summarise it would allow the Catt Anomaly to be simplified by reducing the wire diameters until you remove the wires altogether and just have two parallel beams of electrons (like beta particles) being fired in space in opposite directions. The absurdity of this model is at once apparent: it can't simulate the TEM wave. Two beams of electrons representing current flows in conductors would limit the speed to that of the electrons, which is less than light. As said before, the TEM wave is not caused by electron drift. The light speed TEM wave in current physics is an effect of light-speed, force-causing Yang-Mills radiation, because that is what the electromagnetic field is composed of in the highly successful Standard Model. Electrons move in response to this field. When the electrons move they radiate energy at right angles to the direction they accelerate, and this radiated energy gets exchanged between conductors. Nigel 172.215.63.55 17:05, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Nigel, there is nothing "absurd" about viewing a beam of electrons as a current at all. It is, after all, precisely what the "beam current" in a synchrotron is. Shall we start by noting that the dynamics of the beam coming into existence are different from those of the initial current flow in a conductor, because a conductor is already full of electrons. However, once a "DC" flow has been established there is, in both cases, a flow of charge, which is represented by the J term in the Ampere-Maxwell equation. This is entirely distinct from a "TEM wave" as the term is used in "conventional" physics, where there is no flow of charge (ie J=0) but instead there is a non-zero \frac{\partial \mathbf{D}}{\partial t} (changing electric field/ "displacement current") term.

Whereas J is not directly constrained by Maxwell's equations, the relationships between E and D, and between H and B, mean that when the Ampere-Maxwell equation and Faraday's Law of Induction are combined for the case where J=0, you get equations which relate E and H (or D and B) with their own second derivatives. These are analogous to \theta = - \frac{d^2 \theta}{d t^2}, which is the equation of a pendulum (and which obviously has a solution in which θ varies sinusoidally). In his article "Maxwell's Equations Revisited" Catt attempts to argue against the sinusoidal solution, using the Faraday equation without the Ampere-Maxwell one.

The Catt Anomaly is entirely due to Catt's failure to recognise that Maxwell's addition of "displacement current" created two distinct scenarios. Catt can't tell the difference and this is reflected in the ambiguity in his Question. Pepper and McEwan don't disagree on the answer to the Question - they disagree on what the question means. -- Kevin Brunt 19:10, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Kevin, I stated in the paragraph above your entry that it is "absurd" that electron beams are equivalent to electricity because electricity goes at light speed while the electron beams move more slowly. You then "respond" by stating that there is nothing absurd. Perhaps you need to read the paragraph again more carefully so you can see the reason why I am saying the analogy is absurd: velocity. For the mechanism involving electron drift (electric current), see my analysis of the Catt Anomaly here: http://electrogravity.blogspot.com/2006/04/maxwells-displacement-and-einsteins.html Nigel 172.143.1.219 19:45, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

Nigel, the issue here is your assertion that "electricity goes at light speed", as this begs the question "What do you mean by 'electricity'?" A beam of electrons represents charge in motion, and that is by definition, a flow of current, and since electrons have mass, they simply cannot move at the speed of light in vacuo. Your "absurdity" is merely a contradiction that demonstrates that your definition of electricity is incompatible with the observed phenomenon of current flow. -- Kevin Brunt 18:10, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Kevin, by "electricity" I mean what powers things when you close a switch. The problem is not in my definition of electricity, but in the idea of 1 mm/s electron drift current somehow delivering significant energy, when we already know the truth: quantum field theory tells us that the electric field is mediated by light speed radiation (gauge bosons of electromagnetism). Why try to explain c-speed electricity using 1 mm/s electron drift when the mainstream theory of the field is already c-speed gauge bosons? Why try to use a 19th century theory which is false, when you have a better 20th century theory handy? That is absurd! Nigel 172.188.235.104 21:41, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Nigel, we've been round this before. The electron drift velocity is an average which describes the motion of the conduction electrons as a single entity. The correct model is to view the conduction electrons as a rigid mass moving at the e.d.v. The velocity is proportional to the current. The forces acting are proportional to the voltages. Resistance is a frictional force acting against the direction of motion. An analysis produces a direct correspondence between the electrical equations and the mechanical ones. The kinetic energy of the electrons is irrelevant, because with a constant DC current the velocity is also constant, so the KE is as well. And it doesn't matter that the actual motion of the electrons is more complicated than is implied by the "single rigid mass" model, because all of that is hidden behind the averaging of the drift velocity.

You always leave out the forces acting on the electrons. Since the forces are related to the voltages, this means that your model cannot get the energy right, because you need energy = V.I.t. This is where Catt's "energy current" comes apart as well, because he assumes that it is in phase with the voltage, and simply doesn't bother to consider what the current is getting up to. -- Kevin Brunt 22:34, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Kevin, the point is that electric current is the result of electromagnetic fields. If you send logic signals of same amplitude in opposite directions along the same transmission line, there is no electric current while they overlap, there is just energy current for the duration of the overlap. Dr Walton did the research on this and proved it theoretically as well as by experiment. It is vital. See page http://www.ivorcatt.com/1_3.htm top illustrations: while two opposite-travelling logic pulses overlap, if they have similar amplitude they cancel each other's magnetic fields (because the B-fields have opposite curls), and during overlap there is no variation in voltage along the line, so the field E = dV/dx = 0/dx = 0. Hence there is no electric [electron drift] current, there is only Heaviside-Poynting energy currents going in both directions creating a detectable net voltage (although no gradient in that voltage along the overlap region since dV/dx = 0), and nothing else. You are the one who leaves out the forces acting on the electrons; I keep telling you that the Standard Model says those forces are gauge bosons which constitute the field, and they go at light velocity. Nigel 172.206.104.113 15:14, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

Nigel, I totally agree that at the point of full "overlap" there is no electron drift, and therefore no current. Where you are totally at sea is in asserting that the electric field is related to the rate of change of voltage. This is nonsense; the field is related to the voltage itself.

It doesn't matter whether the magnetic field causes the current, or vice versa - where there is no current there is no magnetic field. Where there is no magnetic field ExH is zero, so there is no energy current either. Catt interprets the two pulses as crossing without interacting. The alternative model is that at the "point of contact" the situation "seen" by either of the pulses is identical to that which would be found if it had found an open end to the TL and that the pulse is reflected. The normal interpretation is that the flow of current is brought to a stop and the energy held in the associated magnetic field is converted energy stored in the electric field, which explains the observed doubling of the voltage. This model automatically explains why a pulse "in motion" along a conductor loses energy into the conductor's resistance whereas when contrary pulses overlap there is no resistive loss. Catt's "reciprocating energy currents" model can only explain this by asserting that the losses cancel each other out. This is highly implausible, particularly from the point of view of the Laws of Thermodynamics; it is far more likely that the processes that cause the resistive loss have been cancelled out, and this leaves us with the situation that Catt's energy current theory predicts contrary energy flows which have no observable effects. Catt's theory simply cannot survive Occam's Razor! -- Kevin Brunt 12:59, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Electron plasma waves

Can em waves travel at 'c' in the so called 'electron plasma' at the surface of a conductor as the reader in Physics, Dr. McEwan seemed to imply. If so, does this negate all (most) of Catts theories? Is this mode substantially different from em wave propagation in space? --Light current 15:05, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Nigel, your question would appear to be just a restatement of Catt's interminable "Question". At any rate, you are certainly seriously misrepresenting what McEwan said, because he was not discussing an electromagnetic wave outside the conductor, but a flow of current inside it.
If you look at Catt's Anomaly "Book", you will see that he has two distinct (and incompatible) formulations of the Question. The Question itself starts "...when a TEM step...". However a couple of paragraphs earlier, he summarised the problem as "When a battery is connected...". In orthodox physics these are completely different questions.
Pepper, who clearly had not seen Catt's Wireless World articles, took the Question at face value. It is perfectly obvious that Pepper read the question as relating to an electromagnetic wave, of external origin, impinging on a conductor. On the other hand, it is equally obvious that McEwan did read Wireless World. (The final paragraph of his letter shows this clearly.) McEwan considers the flow of current that results from the application of a DC voltage at one end of the conductor.
Catt has claimed to have seen representative examples of the two sides of the "Anomaly" in physics textbooks. However, he seems never to have provided references to the books in question, so it isn't possible to go back to the original sources. It is very likely that were anyone to do so, they would find that the disagreement is entirely due to Catt applying his "heretical" redefinitions of physics terms to an orthodox text. -- Kevin Brunt 18:45, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Hello Kevin. my name is User:Light current not Nigel! However I'll let that pass this once 8-). Im not seriously misrepresenting anyone as I said that 'it seems (to me) that Dr. McEwan implied this'. If he didnt, please tell me what he implied. Also I said 'on the surface': that could imply just inside or just outside. I meant just inside (probably). I am also talking about a 'current' inside the wire being able to move at 'c'. Is it possible?-- that is my question! 8-? --Light current 19:08, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, LC - I was improperly assuming that the usual situation pertained, with Nigel planting a question, and you tidying up his indentation......
The issue is really that McEwan was discussing DC current flow, so the speed of propagation doesn't apply as such. With this context, Catt's "step" should be regarded more as a quarter-cycle (or possibly a half-cycle) of a high-frequency sine wave joining together the two DC voltage levels. Looked at like this, away from the transition there is a current flowing in the volume of the conductor. The transition itself is a "bit of" high-frequency sine wave, so the skin effect has to be taken into account. This means that at the start of the transition the current virtually has to be "outside" the conductor (which means that it is displacement current, rather than a flow of charge.) The charge in the conductor then starts to move so as to "cancel out" the increasing electric field that was causing the displacement current. This is what that Australian paper that you found is saying when it talks about the displacement current "dragging" the charge behind it.
Although the voltage step is clearly "electromagnetic", it is not a "TEM wave" of the sort that Maxwell predicted. Maxwell's waves only had displacement current; the voltage step has current as well (ie both the J and dD/dt terms of the Ampere-Maxwell equation.) Catt, of course, denies the existence of both sorts of current, which is why his argument (in "Maxwell's Equations Revisited, for example) that Maxwell's equations predict that a pulse on a transmission line should vary sinusoidally is simply nonsense. -- Kevin Brunt 20:12, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Apologies accepted Kevin. Nice to talk to you again! I really dont think McEwan was talking DC. If you look at his reply to Catts anomaly question, he was trying to say that the step current could travel at 'c' in the wires. Do you not have the same undersatnding? Pulse on TL should vary sinusiodaly??? What sort of madness is this??--Light current 22:14, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

LC, McEwan was addressing the question "How can a voltage step travel along a conductor at 'close to the speed of light' when the electrons are only moving at the 'electron drift velocity' of about 1mm/sec?" The answer is, of course, that because the electrons are charged particles, their motions involve electric and magnetic fields, with associated forces (and stored energy,) on top of the kinetic energy of a Newtonian "billiard ball" model. What is propagating down the conductor at 'near' light speed is "something electromagnetic" which is causing the electrons to start moving; the motion of the electrons in turn is reinforcing the "something". The implication of the skin effect is that it takes a finite time for the electrons to start moving. For a transition between DC levels this delay is merely a "fuzziness" at the step itself as it passes along the conductor. On the other hand, if you are switching the voltage on and off at a rate that is short relative to the time that it takes for the electrons to "come up to speed", the electrons don't even get to move, so there is no current flow at all, merely the "electromagnetic something". Clearly the two extremes differ from each other in some significant essentials. The "zero frequency" case is steady-state, with current/charge/electrons flowing in the conductor, with unchanging electric and magnetic fields. The "infinite frequency" case has continually changing fields, without current flow (only displacement current) - in fact Maxwell's equations require that the fields vary sinusoidally (or as a sum of sinusoids,) and are a "transverse electromagnetic wave" of the sort that Maxwell predicted; the current flow of the "zero frequency" case changes things completely.
Catt, of course, has discarded both current and displacement current, and instead insists on his "energy current" which is in phase with the voltage step. There is no real problem with "energy current" (that Australian paper used the concept.) Catt's problem is that he tries to make his energy current be a "TEM wave"; the reality is that there are two components to be considered - a displacement current component which is inherently sinusoidal, and a "charge current" one which is not so constrained, the two being tied together by the Ampere-Maxwell equation. This is where Catt's article Maxwells' Equations Revisited goes completely astray, because he tries to claim that Faraday's Law, on its own, requires that a pulse travelling along a conductor vary sinusoidally. Actually, he is trying to argue that the mathematics that predict TEM waves are faulty, and have been since Newton invented the calculus. In fact, the article starts out with a massive error on Catt's part, due to a sloppy analysis of a "thought-experiment" involving the observation of a moving co-ordinate system from a stationary one, and then proceeds to make assertions about what orthodox physics says which are simply not true. -- Kevin Brunt 15:44, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Nigel to Kevin

Kevin, Catt is that ultimate disaster for science, the mathematician-turned-engineer. When an engineer becomes a mathematician, things get going, but not vice-versa. I once made a DVD of Catt talking about his theory, and I will try to put it on to the internet if it can be done in a helpful manner for all involved (I think movies can be uploaded to internet archive [5] and "google video"). I've sorted out the Catt anomaly here: [6] but Catt just won't discuss physics. Despite his winning a maths scholarship to Cambridge in the 1950s and then doing engineering, he doesn't think like a mathematical physicist with any intuition for mechanisms. I've seen him tackle problems with pen and paper, and his way of thinking is extremely "wooden" and conventional. However, he is brilliant within his own sphere of expertise, which is Heaviside's stuff (some of which is approximations that are physically wrong but mathematically useful for predictions, like Ptolemy's earth-centred-universe epicycles). The question for me then was how on earth his 1978 co-authors, both physics graduates (one is a PhD assistant physics professor/senior lecturer) managed to behave the same way as Catt. The answer came when Catt tld me in detail about how they came up with the "capacitor is a transmission line" discovery in May 1976. I've got that on the DVD (together with Catt reading out key sections from Heaviside's books and comenting on them, which is valuable for the record). Catt says that he and Walton came up with the discovery in the GEC building and Walton then asked how the electron came into the model of electricity as TEM waves. Catt blocked any discussion of this, instead going into the hero worship of Heaviside who had developed the TEM wave (Heaviside step/Poynting-Heaviside vector). This was a mistake as far as I'm concerned (I've said to Catt since 1996 that the nature of the electron is the number one priority, but he doesn't want to discuss it). Catt was in 1978 relatively old (38) while Walton and Davidson were younger (Davidson suggested building up the capacitor charging curve as a lot of small increments due to the reflections at each end of the transmission line while charging, although Walton did the calculations). So you get a picture of Catt in the position of authority, not wanting to get into modern physics or have anything to do with it, prejudiced against maths as a result of having a brilliant mathematician for a mother. Catt's whole approach to maths is wrong. You know that there are different ways of learning things, and if you make something too rigorous it takes all the fun out of it. If you have to learn endless French verbs and such like, that can put you off, because there is no fun and the whole thing gets associated with terror if you have a poor memory and no motivation. Similarly, maths. If you want to predict or understand something exciting and need maths to do so, you enthusiastically search out the textbooks or journals and hunt down what you want, picking up useful knowledge as you do so. That is the best way to learn. Catt gives examples of the sort of really awful maths teaching he was subjected to in his Jan 86 Wireless World autobiographical article A Mathematical Rake's Progress, which is really revealing. Nigel 172.143.1.219 20:19, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

Nigel, Walton (in the preface to "Digital Hardware Design") merely claims to have been a "Junior lecturer" for a period after gaining his PhD. You appear to be inflating his status somewhat - are you reporting something that Catt said? I am inclined to the view, not so much that Catt "overawed" Davidson and Walton, as that he succeeded in presenting a spurious impression of expertise in areas in which the other two lacked sufficient competence to contradict him.
I also very much suspect that Heaviside himself would have been very rude about Catt's interpretation of Heaviside's writings. Heaviside's "We reverse this" shows that he was thinking terms of the electric and magnetic fields causing current flow, rather than the converse, which is the conventional view. (Since the electrons in a conductor are moved by the interactions of their fields, Heaviside's position has a good deal of merit.) Catt's attempts to jettison current altogether are entirely contrary to Heaviside's insight.
Incidentally, your blog entry referenced above has serious problems. You are ignoring the fact that Maxwell's formulation of displacement current comes in two parts. The first part is entirely based on settled (and fully observed) physics of the time. Maxwell took the equations relating charge on a capacitor with voltage, relating capacitance with electrode geometry and dielectric constant, and relating electric field with voltage and electrode geometry. Combining these he obtained an equation which was independent of the capacitor geometry and directly equated charge, field and dielectric constant. Differentiating this gave him an equation relating rate of change of charge (ie current) ith rate of change of field. By defining the rate of change of field as his "displacement current", he obtained the statement that "current + displacement current = 0" - an extension of Kirchoff's Current Law that is valid even when voltages are changing.
The second part of Maxwell's derivation was the prediction, based entirely on theoretical argument, that displacement current should cause a magnetic field. Nobody prior to this had considered the possibility, and the magnitude of the effect is so small that it hadn't drawn attention to itself. This is what is being referred to in the text that you quote, which is entirely valid regardless of your argument.
It is clear from the article "The History of Displacement Current" and his subsequent annotations that Catt also does not understand the two-part nature of displacement current. -- Kevin Brunt 21:22, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Kevin, Maxwell's displacement current in a vacuum is disproved by the proof that renormalization in quantum electrodynamics predicts the Lamb shift and magnetic moment of leptons. Maxwell says displacement current i = dD/dt where D is displacement, which is due to a polarization of charge in the vacuum according to Maxwell. The error was found after Dirac's equation was corrected for vacuum charge effects. If Maxwell's theory was right, any electric charging, even to an infidesimally small potential difference (voltage) results from vacuum charge polarization. Quantum electrodynamics proves that if this were the case, the vacuum would polarize around each real charge so as to entirely cancel out all real charges. This is absurd. Quantum electrodynamics proves that no charge polarization is possible in the vacuum below the lower energy cutoff in the corrected (renormalized) electron charge formula, with this lower cutoff for polarization corresponding to an electric field strength of 6.9 x 10^20 volts/metre [7]. This is the electric field strength by Gauss’ law at a distance 1.4 x 10^-15 metre from the middle of an electron, which is the maximum range to which vacuum polarization can occur[8]. Therefore, Maxwell's displacement current, since it relies on vacuum polarization ideas for weaker electric fields, is false. My post which you refer to is concerned mainly with replacing Maxwell's false theory with a corrected theory [9]. Your distinction between Maxwell's prediction of displacement current due to vacuum charge polarization, and the resulting magnetic field from the motion of vacuum charges during their polarization, is nice yet superfluous. There is no polarization of the vacuum and hence no displacement current if the electric field strength is below 6.9 x 10^20 volts/metre [10]. Nigel 172.206.104.113 15:31, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

Nigel, Maxwell 1) showed that Kirchoff's Current Law could be made to work in the case of a charging capacitor by adding an additional term representing rate of change of electric field, 2) following on from this he predicted that a changing electric field has an associated field and 3) he interpreted these phenomena in terms of his Aether theories. As a result of 3) he saddled the concept of a changing electric field with the label "displacement current". As it turns out further experimentation made the Aether concept more and more untenable, and it has been abandoned by mainstream physics. This does not invalidate 1) or 2), for which there is abundant experimental evidence. The only "absurdity" is your attempt to trash Electromagnetism by arguing against a theory that was considered obsolete a century ago! -- Kevin Brunt 22:57, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

Kevin: I'm arguing that Maxwell's electromagnetism theory must be replaced by a quantum theory of electromagnetism [11], while you are defending it despite the fact it is untenable. The real peak electric field in a quantum wave remains the same regardless of the distance the photon travels because it does not spread out, while in Maxwell's classical wave the electric field falls due to transverse spread like a transverse (surface) water wave spreading out! The problem that Maxwell's equations don't match in their existing form reality is shown by many things, including as I've already stated the rise in electric charge in high energy Coulomb scattering between electrons, which as Levine and Koltick showed in Physical Review Letters in 1997, causes the observable electric charge to rise 7% at 92 GeV collisions. Maxwell's equations are only valid for distances between charges which are greater than about 10^-15 metre. Therefore, it isn't right. The whole Maxwell theory is mechanically wrong and quantitatively wrong, and it is absurd for you to claim otherwise. I've explained this before. Physics must make progress to overcome faults. Nigel 172.159.252.83 12:18, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

Nigel. Yes, classical physics does break down at the extremes of scale because it is founded on the assumption that the phenomena of physics remain unchanged at all scales. That Maxwell's Equations break down at extremely small scales does not detract from their observed applicabilty at macroscopic scales. Your quoting of a text discussing Maxwell's prediction of the magnetic field relating to his "displacement current" and dismissing it as a "falsehood" is itself a falsehood. likewise your argument against Ohm's Law and Kirchoff's Laws because they apply only to DC (incidentally, nothing to do with an argument about scale) is merely obfuscation.
Ohm's Law is really about the loss of energy that occurs when a current flows through a resistance. When physicists started to consider varying voltages and currents, they found that they had to account for the storage of energy in the electric field of a capacitor and the magnetic field of an inductor. By using the concept of "reactance" as a analogue of resistance, and the composite "impedance", they were able to formulate a modified Ohm's Law which does apply to changing voltages and current.
Maxwell's derivation of displacement current does precisely the same thing for Kirchoff's Current Law. He took three known equations defining a capacitor, combined them and rearranged them to obtain a new equation of the same form as Kirchoff's Current Law, but with an additional term containing the rate of change of the electric field. This term conceptually resembles a current in the same way that reactance resembles resistance.
You obviously also haven't realised what that quote of Maxwell's that you're so fond of means. The original form of Kirchoff's Current Law requires that charge be transported instantaneously through a conductor. This is, in fact, why Maxwell's initial derivation of displacement current assumes that the charge on the capacitor is evenly distributed across the plates - he was constrained by the existing theoretical framework to make it so. It was not until he had derived the concept of displacement current that he could start to consider the possibility of an uneven distribution of charge as it is the addition of displacement current that allows the equations of electricity to countenance the motion of charge at anything less than infinite velocity.
It is this that lies beneath Maxwell's statement about the velocity of electric current. His work eliminated the only theoretical constraint on its velocity, so that it became a quantity that had to be measured. -- Kevin Brunt 19:39, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

Kevin, you say: "That Maxwell's Equations break down at extremely small scales does not detract from their observed applicabilty at macroscopic scales." Similarly, you should be consistent and defend other false models which appear to work over limited ranges, such as Ptolemy's earth-centred universe with its epicycles. You should go around defending that by saying: "That Ptolemy's Equations break down at extremely small scales (terrestrial gravity effects) does not detract from their observed applicabilty at macroscopic scales (the planets)." You clearly don't understand science. The true model [12] is different from Maxwell's. The physics is different. The equations are different. Maxwell's equation is only an approximation even at large scales because the charge is not a continuously variable quantity, but is quantized into electron units. Maxwell's model, even just the mathematical model is wrong for light because it doesn't allow for this quantization of charge in the displacement current law for any charging object, be that an atom with an approaching electron (changing energy levels) or a large capacitor plate. Nigel 172.188.248.219 11:17, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Geocentric model as an analogy

Nigel, your use of the geocentric model as an analogy is invalid, as the heliocentric model is a competitor at the same level of scale. In fact, the difference between the models is really only a point of view; the real problem was that the geocentric position had become entangled in a philosophical confusion between scientific fact and religious Truth, and had become theology. Maxwell's Equations are the result of detailed experimentation and observation. Maxwell found that in order to make the Equations consistent he had to predict that a changing electric field has an associated magnetic field - and when people looked for the magnetic field they found it! To use your Ptolemy analogy, Maxwell's Equations would be represented by the equations that describe the relative positions of the Earth and the Sun, etc. Obviously these equations would have to give an answer that matches the observed positions, regardless of which model is in use. The difference between the geocentric and heliocentric models is that, once it was realised that orbits were elliptical, the heliocentric model eliminated all the epicycles. (With circular orbits, it actually required more!)
I don't find the "90 degrees" argument in your blog entry convincing at all. You are attempting to argue basics from a specific arrangement of conductors (the TL) where there are additional things going on. A better place to start would be to consider a capacitor in the form of a gap in a straight piece of wire. In this case the electric field (and hence the displacement current) is in the same direction as the motion of charge. This clearly demonstrates that your perpendicularity argument is an artifact of the geometry of the transmission line, rather than anything fundamental to the mathematics of the displacement current.
Your assertion in the blog entry about Maxwell not knowing what the "speed of electricity" is is equally invalid. As I've pointed out Maxwell started out by assuming that charge spread instantaneously, because that is what Kirchoff's Current Law required. You appear to think that this somehow invalidates Maxwell's argument - this is merely repeating Catt's misconception. Once Maxwell had added the displacement current term, he was able to drop this assertion. The problem is that the way that scientists deal with things that aren't uniform is to use calculus. The voltage on some finite area of a capacitor is related to the charge on that area. When you use the "tends to zero" approach of calculus, you end up with a differential equations. Scientists like differential equations, because there are all sorts of mathematical tools to deal with them; Catt, of course, is allergic to calculus. -- Kevin Brunt 14:07, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Kevin, you say "your use of the geocentric model as an analogy is invalid, as the heliocentric model is a competitor at the same level of scale. In fact, the difference between the models is really only a point of view; the real problem was that the geocentric position had become entangled in a philosophical confusion between scientific fact and religious Truth, and had become theology." [Emphasis added by me.]

You just assert the analogy is invalid because there is a competitor, but this is a false criticism because there is a competitor to Maxwell's equations: quantum field theory. Then you assert falsely that the models are different only in point of view. (This is false because the circles plus epicycles Ptolemic model is not a dual of the correct elliptical orbits. It's like comparing a guessed empirical damping law x = 1/(1 + y) with lots of correction factors to the correct law of the form x = e^-y. Superficially the results look similar but that is just because the former, false, law has been endlessly fiddled to try to make it model the data. The agreement is subjective and ultimately rests upon the many arbitrary ad hoc correction factors, the epicycles.)

Next, you misunderstand the 90 degree problem: you say if you just have a gap in a piece of wire it is the same thing as the capacitor plate, and no current needs to spread in a direction different by 90 degrees to the direction of the electric field lines between the plates. This is false because if you remove the capacitor plates and just use the cross-sectional area of the end of the wires as the capacitor plates, then the electric field strength in the radial direction (from the middle to the edge of the exposed wire end) is not zero: there will be a radial electric field. This will accelerate electrons to cause a current, and the resultant acceleration of charge in the radial direction causes radiation at 90 degrees to the direction of radiation, so the radiation is in the direction of "displacement current".

Finally, you say: "As I've pointed out Maxwell started out by assuming that charge spread instantaneously, because that is what Kirchoff's Current Law required. You appear to think that this somehow invalidates Maxwell's argument - this is merely repeating Catt's misconception. Once Maxwell had added the displacement current term, he was able to drop this assertion."

Wrong: Maxwell's false argument is obvious. He starts with electromagnetic constants derived from electrical and magnetic measurements, all based on currents flowing in conductors. He then claims he is calculating the speed of light. Why not more naturally assume - since his equations are based on electrical experiments - that he is calculating the speed of, say, alternating current electricity? Answer: because nobody knew the speed of alternating current electricity, but people did know the speed of light and Weber in 1856 had already shown that it is approximately the square root of the ratio of the electromagnetic constants. So Maxwell's error is wishful thinking, and it is just an ad hoc model. By the time Heaviside came along and said that electricity goes at light speed and suepiciously seems more like Maxwell's light than light does, Maxwell had died and his Treatise continues to say that he had no idea what the speed of electricity was. This is tragic.

I've already explained that displacement current flows in the wrong direction by 90 degrees for his light model to work. Maxwell needs to have the electric field and the displacement current directions different by 90 degrees for his model of light, but in the capacitor both of these vectors have the same direction (from one plate to the other).

To correct Maxwell's model of light, we have to forget 'displacement current' and take the real current in the conductor instead. Even if he assumed electricity somehow flows instantly, it still has to have direction, and still has to flow along a capacitor plate in order that the whole plate can be charged. Once we do this, we have more information coming out of the theory than Maxwell had, because we know that to get charge flowing it must be accelerated, which results in the radiation of energy. What Maxwell thought to be 'displacement current' is indistinguishable from a radiation effect. I'll try writing a fresh blog entry which makes the corrected model clearer and easier to appreciate. Nigel 172.143.212.120 11:42, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Nigel, you are going do have to produce some diagrams, because it is entirely unclear why you think that "Maxwell needs to have the electric field and the displacement current directions different by 90 degrees for his model of light, but in the capacitor both of these vectors have the same direction (from one plate to the other)". It sounds suspiciously like the assertion in History of Displacement Current that "Maxwell ... did not notice the discrepancy in the requirements of displacement current; that in a capacitor it must act like real current but in a transmission line it must not". This latter is nonsense; Catt et al argue that because the current is spreading along the TL, there is no need to invoke displacement current to preserve "continuity of current". In fact, it is merely one of several statements in the article which demonstrate that the authors are totally confused about the difference between "continuity of current" and "continuity of charge".
The correct interpretation is that the entire length of the TL that the voltage step has passed through is a capacitor that has charged and is now steady; the length beyond the step is an uncharged capacitor; and the length containing the step is a capacitor in the process of being charged - the amount of current entering does not match that leaving. In order to work out the total field on that length of TL, you would have to integrate the voltage along its length, except that someone's already done the work to show that it would come out the same as if the charge were evenly distributed along the length. Furthermore, irrespective of the shape of the voltage step, the difference in the total field between two instants in time will be exactly what Maxwell's formulation of displacement current says it should be. Since this argument would apply for any arbitrary portion of the TL, including the whole of its length, Catt's primary argument against Maxwell's derivation of displacement current evaporates.
Your argument against Maxwell's em wave/light wave equivalence also has problems. It is irrelevant whether or not Maxwell was trying to make his ideas fit the observed similarity between the ratio of the electromagnetic units and the speed of light, because theoretical science is the process of fitting ideas to observed fact. Maxwell came up with "displacement current" as a description of the known behaviour of a charging capacitor. He then went on to predict that a changing electric field would have an associated magnetic field (which is so, because people have done the experiments.) And to round it off, Maxwell showed that when his "displacement current" term was included in the equations we now know as "Maxwell's Equations" there was a class of solution where the electric and magnetic fields varied sinusoidally, such that they acted perpendicular to each other, and furthermore that there was necessarily motion in a direction mutually perpendicular to the fields at a velocity determined by the ratio of the electromagnetic unit which Weber had already calculated as being suspiciously similar to the velocity of light. This allowed Maxwell to put forward the hypothesis that light was a transverse electromagnetic wave, for experimental physicists to go off and try to prove (or disprove). -- Kevin Brunt 22:37, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Kevin, see http://thumbsnap.com/v/kzccvHav.gif - the current in the wire travels along the outside of the wire not through the middle (due to the "skin depth" effect) so it turns inwards at the end. The only difference between this and Catt's model is - as you can see [13] the current travels in the opposite direction. Catt is right. Nigel 172.209.84.241 18:04, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

No, Nigel, you have not proved that "Catt is right." You have merely reiterated his observation that there exist situations in which the charge on a capacitor is evenly spread across the surface. What you have not done, and what Catt has never done, is to provide any sort of demonstration at all to disprove the contention that Maxwell's modification of Kirchoff's Current Law (ie dQ/dt + dD/dt = 0) does not apply in the general case as well as in the simple "even charge" case that Maxwell used for his analysis.
The evenly-distributed charge example is commonly found in "basic" textbooks because the mathematics is particularly simple. In order to get to anything more complicated, you have to use calculus, at which point (as you've already noted) Catt stops reading the textbook. -- Kevin Brunt 23:08, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Kevin, the Kirchoff circuital current law dQ/dt + dD/dt = 0 is correct so far as it is a mathematical model dealing with large numbers of electrons. The problems with it as that it assumes, by virtue of the differential dQ/dt, that charge is a continuous variable and is not composed of discontinuities (electrons). So it is false on that score, and is only a mathematical approximation which is useful when the number dQ/dt represents a large change in the number of electrons passing a given point in the circuit in a second. A second flaw with the equation is the second term dD/dt (displacement current) which is a mathematical artifact and doesn't describe a real vacuum displacement current. Instead, the reality is a radiative field effect, not a displacement or vacuum current. There is no way the vacuum can be polarized to give an electric displacement current where the field strength is below 10^18 volts/metre. Hence, displacement current doesn't exist. The term dD/dt represents a simple but involved mechanism whereby accelerating charges at the wavefront in each conductor exchange radio frequency energy but none of the energy escapes to the surroundings because each conductor's emission is naturally an inversion of the signal from the other, so the superimposed signals cancel out as seen from a distance large in comparison to the distance of separation of the two conductors. (As I've explained and illustrated previously: [14]). Nigel 172.203.243.23 19:13, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Nigel, the fixed charge of an electron isn't "discontinuous" any more than the mass of a billiard ball is. It merely requires that the appropriate mathematical techniques are applied. Likewise your specious arguments against displacement current based on a presumed lower cutoff on field strength. Where there is charge, there is electric field. In fact, we know there is charge because we observe the field. When the charge moves, the field changes. At macroscopic scales Maxwell's modification of Kirchoff's Current Law applies. At quantum mechanical scales all of "classical physics" becomes wobbly, if only because of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. And physicists largely abandoned the interpretation of a changing electric field as any sort of real flow in the Aether a century ago. -- Kevin Brunt 18:59, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

Kevin: I = dQ/dt is false because when the number of electrons passing any point in a circuit in a second is small, it breaks down. You can't use continuous differential equations for inherently discrete processes. Otherwise you inject mathematical artifacts which you know are not even modelling the phenomena. That's myth-making, and religion, not physics. Nigel 172.201.42.230 18:37, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Nigel, you are rapidly returning to your electron drift argument again. "Current" is really "charge flow in a conductor", and as such is a summarisation of the motion of all the electrons in the conductor. The electrons in a solid are so close together that it is simply not possible to move one without all the others redistributing themselves to re-establish the equilibrium of the forces between the electrons. "Current" is a statement about the average motion of the electrons; "electron drift velocity" is a different statement of that average motion.
When you start talking about single electrons, the concept of taking an average breaks down, which means that talking about "current" in the macroscopic sense is simply meaningless. In any case, if you are dealing with individual electrons with no neighbours close enough to interact you no longer have current flow in a conductor anyway, and you should expect to have to deploy a different model (or more precisely a different aspect of the more complete model that underlies both situations.) -- Kevin Brunt 19:46, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Kevin: I = dQ/dt is an average for a statistically large number of electrons. This is the basic problem with the injection of calculus into quantum/discrete physics. It applies to averages, but doesn't describe things at the unit charge level.

The capacitor charges up by one unit of e each time an electron enters the plate. So the charging is a lot of small steps on that basis. Catt's idea of a lot of small steps is totally different and wrong, being based on Heaviside's step-fronted (discontinuous) energy current, which is a lie. Heaviside's total stupidity on this was revealed, as Dr Lynch stated to me (in written correspondence), when Heaviside insisted that a waveguide can't work. He thought that a TEM wave is just energy current being guided around the outside of conductors by some kind of magic. (The mainstream dismissed this error of Heaviside, but Catt sadly took it up and glued it into his theory, making a mess of his theory.) Heaviside argued that a metal (conducting) box can't allow propagation of a TEM wave within it, because the sides (all connected together) would short out the TEM wave. He viewed it like a parallel plate transmission like, with two other conducting sides added to it, forming a short-circuit transmission line which can't propagate TEM waves within it. Heaviside's theoretical error in dismissing the waveguide is something I took up with Catt, who refused to listen. The fact that a metal conducting box is a waveguide for microwaves is contrary to Heaviside. The waveguide works by simply keeping the microwaves within it, preventing escape (the size of the waveguide must also be right for the wavelength, to ensure that the angles of reflection are such that microwaves keep propagating the right way, and get reflected back in large quantities to the resonator which is producing them). Heaviside's idea of conductors (wires) acting like waveguides for his "energy current" without electric current being crucial, is like the idea of the old farmer (for analogy of Catt problem to old farmer see [15] for instance) who puts a fencepole in the middle of the field, and hopes it will guide the hert of cattle to stay around it (ie, he hopes that the cattle have a theoretical misunderstanding of what a fence is). Obviously, TEM wave energy if it is like a light wave or energy current, would not be confined to travel around conductors. The waveguide acts by boxed confinement, preventing escape. The Heaviside-Catt TEM waveguide story is pure metaphysics, because there would be nothing to keep the TEM wave beside the conductor. Clearly, the TEM wave around conductors carrying energy is not what Heaviside and Catt claim it is. Nigel 172.159.94.253 15:13, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Nigel, your attempt to model a single electron entering a capacitor plate as a "discontinuity" simply doesn't fly. You are forgetting (again) that an electron has an electric field around it stretching out to infinity. As your electron approaches the plate all the electric fields interact creating forces that tend to move the electrons that are already in the plate. There could only be a discontinuity if you could get the electron to move faster than the fields can propagate, which Einstein proved to be impossible (and he used Maxwell's Equations and electrons moving slowly in his proof!)
As for "Heaviside-Catt TEM"; go back and reread that paragraph of Heaviside's that Catt quotes - the "We reverse this" one. What Heaviside was arguing against was not what Catt calls "Theory N" (which ignores the electric and magnetic fields in favour of "pure" voltage and current.) Rather Heaviside was arguing against a model (which he appears to ascribe to Maxwell) where the energy, held separately in the electric and magnetic fields, is "carried" along the conductor by the charge. Heaviside presumably rejected this model because he could not make it fit with the known flow of energy as voltage x current. Instead he took the idea of ExH from the Poynting vector, which immediately and obviously ties up with VxI.
Heaviside's position is that there is a flow of charge and a flow of energy, but although they are related, they are not necessarily exactly "in phase" with each other, so that a full model needs to explain both.
Now consider Catt's exposition of his energy current in chapter 1 of his Electromagnetism. He doesn't even mention ExH; instead, his argument is based entirely on the assertion that the energy is rigidly divided between the electric and magnetic fields, which is what Heaviside explicitly rejected.
Catt's "energy current" is not the same as Heaviside's.
And as for the "TEM", Heaviside undoubtedly understood why Maxwell's Equations can be satisfied by a set of equations which describe the electric and magnetic fields at a point as acting at right angles to each other and varying in intensity sinusoidally, while moving at the speed of light in a direction mutually perpendicular to both fields. More to the point, he would also have had no difficulty in understanding why the fields associated with his current/energy current flow in a conductor could be compatible with Maxwell's Equations without being oscillatory, which is a necessary part of the physicists' definition of a "transverse wave". -- Kevin Brunt 22:14, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
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